Thomas Dolby: "Love Is a Loaded Pistol"

For his first studio album release in decades, musical innovator Thomas Dolby has been composing music in the uniquely inspirational setting of a restored life-boat. Here he premieres a gorgeous, evocative song from that album -- about one night with a legend. He's backed by members of the modern string quartet Ethel.

TED Music Director Thomas Dolby has spent his career at the intersection of music and technology. From his beginnings in the London underground electronica scene, he rose to MTV stardom, then founded a high-tech start-up; his company Beatnik probably made your ringtone.

Perhaps best known for blinding us with science, TED Music Director Thomas Dolby has always blurred the lines between composition and invention. As a London teenager, Tom Robertson was fascinated with the convergence of music and technology. His experiments with an assortment of keyboards, synthesizers and cassette players led his friends to dub him “Dolby.”

That same fascination later drove him to become an electronic musician and multimedia artist whose groundbreaking work fused music with computer technology and video. Two decades, several film scores, five Grammy nominations and countless live-layered sound loops later, it's clear Dolby's innovations have changed the sound of popular music.

In the 1990s, Dolby re-created himself as a digital-musical entrepreneur, founding Beatnik, which developed the polyphonic ringtone software used in more than half a billion cell phones. Now back to touring and recording (after a 15-year hiatus), he's using seriously retro technology -- '40s-era oscilloscopes and Royal Navy field-test equipment -- to control his modern synthesizers, in shows that are at once nostalgic and cutting edge. And he continues his tenure as TED's Music Director, leading the eclectic characters of the TED House Band.