Publishers Weekly
07/29/2019
Musician Young (Waging Heavy Peace) and consumer electronics developer Baker passionately tell of their quest for premium sound in this narrowly focused memoir. Their quest involved creating the PonoPlayer in 2012, a portable device that could play uncompressed audio files, as an alternative to what Young felt were MP3’s poor sound quality. Young, an audio evangelist, argues that digital music is too compressed and muddy, whereas “if the highest-quality music audio were available at a reasonable price... everybody would hear and feel better music.” He and Baker write about their attempt to build Pono, which ranged from haggling with music industry types (“most companies... had to put up millions of dollars for those rights. I was able to get the three major record companies to do it without paying those huge fees”) to launching a multimillion-dollar Kickstarter campaign in 2014. However, Pono was discontinued only three years later, when Omnifone, the music service company that hosted Pono’s store, stopped operating. There’s a great story in here about Pono and the debate over sound quality standards in the music industry, but the authors are too close to the subject to bring it out. The narrative gets too far into the weeds for the casual reader, but tech junkies will find lots to enjoy. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"An intriguing account of Young's determination to provide world-class audio to consumers . . . In print as in song, Young's passion will not be quenched."
—USA Today
"Part manifesto and part how-not-to manual . . . Just as when he's taken up various ecological mantles over the years, Young is fighting large and historical forces."
—WIRED
"The success of To Feel the Music is in the passion Young brings to his mission to save audio. His reasons are just. His dedication bleeds from the page. And you get the feeling, despite any setbacks, he will not stop until we're all listening to music again the way it was supposed to be heard."
—Under the Radar
"To Feel the Music is a fascinating tale about countless intersections: of artistry and technology, of creativity and commerce, of entrepreneurs and organizers, of the individual and the team. It's heartbreaking on some fronts and inspiring in many others. I will never listen to music in quite the same way after reading this book, nor ever again take for granted the ingenuity behind the high-tech devices amid which we live."
—James Fallows, national correspondent, The Atlantic
"One of the greatest musicians of all time, Neil Young knows the effort artists put into their work so that their audiences can feel the music. In a very easy-to-understand way, Neil explains how, unlike for photographs or television, each generation of digital technology has further degraded sound quality. Neil and collaborator Phil Baker lay out concrete solutions to restore music fidelity without sacrificing listener convenience in this fascinating read brimming with passion."
—Dan Hesse, retired CEO, Sprint
"This book provides backstage access to a fascinating story about the intersection of art, technology, and business. Young and Baker's passion for their respective crafts is tangible on every page."
—Harry McCracken, technology editor, Fast Company
"Neil Young is not only a rock star in the music industry. He has emerged as a rock star in championing and challenging the tech industry to deliver the kind of sound quality that he and other musicians want their audiences to experience as they do when they record their music . . . The book is a call to action for the tech industry to strive to deliver the best audio quality possible, so that those who listen to Neil Young's songs and music, as well as those from other artists, experience exactly what the artists hear when they create their music."
—Tim Bajarin, president, Creative Strategies, Inc.
"The alchemy of product development is rarely shared like this, from a music legend (and it turns out, an enlightened CEO) and a tech veteran, with refreshing candor about the highs and lows of bringing together people, materials, and energy to deliver sound as intended, straight to the soul."
—Louis Kim, vice president, Hewlett-Packard
JANUARY 2020 - AudioFile
Keith Carradine is a skilled narrator with a deep, resonant voice and an all-American folksiness that would seem to make him an ideal choice for musician Neil Young’s book. Sadly, the problem here is the tiresome content. The premise of this audiobook is that digital music (MP3s) has created an unnatural sonic experience, and we need to fix it. One solution that never caught on was Pono, Young's high-resolution audio company, and much of this audiobook is devoted to an account of the company's epic fail. Young cowrote the book with Phil Baker, who helped develop Pono. The coauthors alternate chapters, and Carradine attempts to duplicate each author's voice. But even this bizarre effort does little to enliven the material. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
