Music criticism is a funny thing. Someone becomes a critic because they are overwhelmed by their own subjective opinions about music, yet it is the job of the critic to become completely objective about music. Good critics are good at distancing themselves from a subject that they feel very close to. Perhaps this is why the best pieces of criticism are usually written about music that the critic has never felt particularly close to in the first place, and perhaps this is why On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno should not have been written by one of Brian Eno’s biggest fans.

Author David Sheppard has taken on the Herculean task of researching Brian Eno, whose “bafflingly convoluted job description” is, in Sheppard’s accurate words, a “‘record-producer-cum-experimental-musician-cum-visual-artist-cum-epistemologist-cum-belle-lettrist-cum-one-man-think-tank-cum-parfumer’ and so on.” Like all great zealots, Sheppard is an excellent researcher, and it shows. Sheppard leads readers meticulously through Eno’s early days in Roxy Music, through his glam-turned-ambient solo efforts, to his status as producer heavyweight. Every collaborator that Eno has ever worked with, every minutia of musical inspiration that Eno has ever had in his waking life, every rival who has ever hated on Eno — all are chronicled by Sheppard so extensively that, at times, there isn’t even enough room in the paragraphs, and things spill into parentheticals and asterisk-marked footnotes. For any obsessed Enophile who thought they knew everything there was to know about Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Music For Films, or just what Eno’s specific lyrical involvements on U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” were, think again. David Sheppard knows way more about these things than you do.

Problem is, though Sheppard might be armed with more trivia than any other Eno fan alive, he still comes across as just that — a fan. His 400-plus pages overflow with hyperbolic statements of praise and adoration. He makes the claim that “you’ve long been able to set your socio-cultural alarm clock by Brian Eno.” This may be true for Enophiles, but what about the rest of the planet? Sheppard comes across as oblivious to the fact that some people in this world do not wake up every morning with their cellphone alarm clocks set to play “Needles in the Camel’s Eye.” If Sheppard intended to convince the world that “to trace the arc of Eno’s…career is to follow the…parabola of Western cultural evolution itself,” then he should have taken a step back and examined Western cultural evolution itself, not just the Eno-worshipping contingent of it.

Sheppard’s facts and figures on Eno’s creative process and studio experiences are interesting. Sheppard’s passionate defense of Eno against other “numbskull” critics’ blasts is endearing. But where is the honest examination of Eno’s early failings as a young father? Where is the unbiased assessment of Brian Ferry’s side of the Roxy Music division? Where is the objective criticism about anything that Brian Eno has ever done, as a musician or as a human being? On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno is lacking in objectivity. This makes it not really a biography of a musician written by a music critic, but rather a 400-plus-page fan letter written by an adoring Enophile. While other Eno biographies (Eric Tamm’s Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound) or even autobiographies (Brian Eno’s A Year With Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno’s Diary) may not be as factually thorough as On Some Faraway Beach. These books pick and choose which facts are the most relevant ones, thus allowing their readers to gather a clearer, more understandable portrait of who Brian Eno was and is.

In the very last paragraph of On Some Faraway Beach, Sheppard provides readers with one last quote that one of Eno’s contemporaries said about him. The quote, Sheppard writes, “offers a tribute to which all Enophiles can surely raise an assenting glass.”

Maybe this is David Sheppard’s way of explaining his own intentions in writing On Some Faraway Beach. Maybe Sheppard never even wanted to write a properly objective music critique on the life and times of Eno; maybe all he wanted was to offer a tribute to which all Enophiles could surely raise an assenting glass. If this is the case — if this is David Sheppard’s aim in writing this book — then it should not be held to standard music biography guidelines, and this writer, as an Enophile herself, surely raises an assenting glass.

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