Luke F. Walton
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Luke F. Walton

Love Music More

Love Music More is an ongoing philosophical inquiry into why we love music.

The show was almost called Music Appreciation 101. I wasn't interested in telling people what to appreciate. I wanted to understand why they appreciate it in the first place.

I talk to musicians, producers, engineers, composers, and other people who have devoted some part of their lives to music. We talk about craft, taste, history, technology, creativity, and the strange things music does to people.

At the end of every guest conversation, I ask the same question: Why do you love music?

Knowing how music works doesn't explain why we love it. Being good at making it doesn't necessarily bring us any closer to an answer.

I'm not looking for a final answer. I'm interested in what happens when we keep asking.

A newsletter and podcast hosted by Luke F. Walton. Co-owned with and produced by Beformer. New episodes Tuesdays; the newsletter and deeper dives on Substack.

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Spotify for Creators ranked this show in the top 10% of all podcasts on Spotify in 2025.

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Recent episodes

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Guest indexEpisode notesLove Music Why

Recent posts

Recent newsletter posts. Philosophy-of-music pieces are hosted here; other titles open on Substack.

On Substack

Music historyFull archive

History of Rock. The words History of Rock in rounded letters on a painted field.
The History of Rock
Selected posts

A few posts to start with. Other essays are on Writing.

Tuning into the Universe's Frequency (What Are Notes?) All notes are frequencies; all frequencies are waves. A note is what an ensemble agrees to call a pitch (culture, not essence) on an infinite gradient.
Why are there twelve notes? Western music's twelve tones come from stacking octaves (2:1) and fifths (3:2): a search for order and divinity in ratios, whether or not the universe is actually that tidy.
It's the Circle of Fifths Stack perfect fifths twelve times and you close a circle, or a spiral, until musicians fudge the math (enharmonics) the way geocentrism fudged the planets.
440 or 432 Hz — What Frequency Is Better? A=440 Hz is a 20th-century compromise, not a cabal. 432 is a beautiful idea that cheapens music if you treat it as the one true frequency. Frequency is a spectrum, not a binary.
A Brief History of Funk Music When groove is the point: Music History 101.
Long Live Rock 'n' Roll Modern rock and its many splinters from the tree of rawk.
CBGB: from Punk to Post-Punk Downtown New York, punk, and what came after CBGB.
Rock Star? Pop Star? Alien? How David Bowie and Barbarella created glam rock.

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Archive

Earlier shows (MUSiAN, Six Months to Make It) are listed at Music → @lukefwalton YouTube.

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