e537 — Reading, Listening & Building Together

guitar chord — Photo by Scott Gruber on Unsplash

Published 4 January 2026

e537 with Michael M and Andy – ringing in the new year with the amazing power of music to move and heal, LEGO and retro builds and a whole lot more.

Andy, Michael and Michael would like to wish all of our listeners a very happy 2026!

Michael M and Andy start off 2026 on a good note – or perhaps better said – a series of good notes. Michael shares some of his vacation reading, beginning with the book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord by Daniel Levitin. In this book, Levitin highlights the power of music to move and heal, and provides a Linktree to listen to the songs featured in the book, which is included in the show notes below. One particular example from the book was the Ella Fitzgerald recording of Mack the Knife in Berlin, and the magic she created in the moment when she forgot the lyrics.

Andy highlights an amazing musical creation moment with Jacob Collier’s improvisation with the National Symphony Orchestra. This reminded Michael of Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander’s book, Art of Possibility, and maestro Zander’s TED talk on the power of classical music. Michael also brought up David Byrne’s book, How Music Works, and his learning in Puerto Rico on how dancers conduct the musicians as they perform together.

Byrne discussed mixtapes in his book, and the modern equivalent of them are the playlist, which is exactly what Levitin’s Linktree leads to. Michael created a mixtape to express musically what he was trying to say in words for his NCSSM convocation speech at the start of the 2025-26 school year. Andy shares a couple of intriguing ways to create music through retro devices and common household products – all of these are in the links below.

Moving to the building part of the episode, Andy and Michael start off with LEGO, and this is about to be a banner year for the company with so many new sets coming on the market. There’s a new LEGO Icons building, which has in it a music store and includes a sousaphone player minifig. The cohosts touch on the Star Trek Enterprise set which was also just launched, which includes a minifig of Commander Riker with his trombone. Andy describes the awesomeness that is the LEGO GameBoy with the inventive buttons on the device, and the team then touch on a couple of retro consoles such as the Commodore 64 reboot.

The team wraps up this episode with a mention of Andy’s grumpiness on the year end Tech Grumps podcast.

What music has inspired you in 2025? What builds (LEGO, retro or otherwise) are you planning for 2026? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!

Selected Links

Reading

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord by Daniel J Levitin

Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Die Driegroschenoper – listen to the “Moritat von Mackie Messer” excerpt sung by Bertholt Brecht in the Featured Audio & Video section

Games at Work e485: Barbarians at the Rhubarb Bar (for flow, and of course Barbara’s Rhabarberbar)

Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander

Benjamin Zander’s TED talk: The transformative power of classical music

Games at Work e9: Reality is Broken (for Jane McGongial’s book, and Benjamin Zander’s Ode to Joy)

How Music Works by David Byrne