Three weeks spent reading this book from cover to cover has retuned my mind to many of the values imbued by my earliest, most intimate, experiences of music. For the first time in years, I’ve been listening to Beatles tracks again, hearing them resound clearly in my head, feeling their rainbow of sensations spill out and over my body.

It seems that to get to such a stage of artistry, you can’t avoid the analytical; it’s the bridge that joins the gut with the mind. But if you are of the artistic mind, if you don’t think in terms of balance sheets and flowcharts, how do you escape the artist’s poverty mentality? Is that where collaboration becomes essential? Can one person do it all, or is…