Our eagle-eyed friend Ruth Kissane sent this message over our transom: “Have you heard this? The 8 songs Brian Eno couldn’t live without?”
The 8 songs come from a BBC Radio 4 show, Desert Island Discs, which interviews people-of-note about what eight tracks they would take to a desert island, and WHY, which often goes deep into their wild lives. (They also get to chose a book and a luxury.) The 2,000+ “castaways” include Eric Clapton, Lauren Bacall, Charlie Watts, Robert Macfarlane, Yo-Yo Ma, Stephen Hawking, Annie Lenox, Jane Gardam, and Arundhati Roy to name a few. You can stream the interviews on Spotify or at BBC 4.
Spotify made a playlist of The 8 songs Brian Eno couldn’t live without. (One is inexplicably missing: Nikolai Ivanovitch Kompaneiski’s ‘Herouvimska Pessen’.) Listen to the interview and his explanations here.
We love what Eno said about why he chose ‘Lord Don’t Forget About Me’ by Dorothy Love Coates as his favorite song to take with him:
The last record is a gospel song, I mean, gospel is, I suppose, the music I’ve listened to more than any other over the last few years. I particularly love the gospel style of singing, the way that the voice is liberated in this way of singing. This is a song by probably the most liberated of all the gospel singers.
Dorothy Love Coates voice is amazingly wild and free.
Ruth reframed “Which 8 tracks would we take to a desert island?” Her potent question has been reverberating around our heads for days:
…What is the MUSIC that enlivens US? turns us on?
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