Brian Eno Reveals the Hidden Purpose of All Art

Brian Eno has been involved in so many varied and significant musical adventures that to call him a Zelig-like figure — which is often done — is to risk understating his reach and importance. The English musician and ideas man helped birth glam and art rock as a member of Roxy Music. He had a strong hand in iconic works by David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and Coldplay. Across a series of his own influential albums he pretty much invented ambient music. Eno’s clutch of nonambient solo albums are by turns nervy, catchy, enigmatic and moving. And so he has gone, fruitfully hither and yon, up to his latest, this fall’s “FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE.” (Listening to the album, with its musical evocations of technological decay and natural resilience, while my commuter train rumbles through swampy New Jersey industrial blight has often turned my usual emotionally inert trip to the office into a roller coaster of despair and acceptance.) Oh, and Eno, who is 74, has also led a parallel career as a roving music theorist-slash-public intellectual, one with a newly…