Daniel Levitin
Guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Jon Brion is responsible for one of the best produced records of the last ten years, Aimee Mann's "Whatever." Combining electric, acoustic rock,and occasional baroque instrumentation, "Whatever" is a gold mine of memorable melodies and articulate arrangements. Each song is rendered with so many musical ideas that a lesser producer-songwriter team would have greedily cranked out three or four songs for each one on "Whatever."
The son of a jazz band leader, Jon cut his professional teeth playing guitar on albums by Jellyfish, and as one of the principal singers, guitarists and writers for power poppers The Grays. Although not credited with production in either of these bands,it is widely known that Brion made major in-studio contributions to their well-crafted sound. A multi-instrumentalist and collector of rare and exotic instruments (Chamberlains and Mellotrons are a particular passion), Brion has a readily identifiable lead guitar style that relies on massive string bending and exotic tunings. Audience members at his frequent live shows in Los Angeles are typically seen leaving the club with dumbfounded, wide-eyed astonishment at his sheer musicality.
On "Whatever" Brion presents Mann's vocals with stunning intimacy. On the ballad-like "Jacob Marley's Chain" Brion captures subtle nuances of her voice typically lost in the recording process, such as the puff of air that follows the consonant"p," or the parting of her lips each time she opens her mouth to sing. It often sounds as if Aimee is singing the lyrics right into the ear of the listener, an effect that is equally compelling on speakers and headphones, and works even as well on the ballads as on the brasher, louder tracks such as "I Should've Known."
"We used a Neumann M49 at Bearsville," Mann recalls,"and at other studios we used either a U49 or U67." Brion adds, "we ran the tube mics through Focusrite or Hardy preamps, into a Pultec EQ, and then to a modified UREI LA 3A compressor. The quality of Aimee's voice is such that, if you stand right in front of it, it sounds amazing. Some people just have 'mic friendly' voices. The more I heard her voice, the more impressed I am by it." Through the judicious use of compression, Mann's vocals ride above the tracks and never get lost in the band.
Brion and mixer Bob Clearmountain mixed the album very dry, and left out parts that in the end didn't seem to fit, demonstrating that less is definitely more. "It's the kind of record that if it were mixed by your typical mixer, with the kick drum really high, the snare drum with a totally different ambience and some big trigger on it, goo all over everything, and multiple short delays on the vocal and all that crap...we knew we'd just sound stupid and that people would say the production was awful,"Mann explains.
Brion's encyclopedic knowledge of rock music history and musical cleverness is evident throughout "Whatever." For "Could've Been Anyone," a song with a chord progression reminiscent of "Mr. Tambourine Man," Brion hired Roger McGuinn to play the classic Byrds "Mr. Tambourine Man" hook on 12-string electric guitar. During the song "I've Had It,"as the lyric mentions the state of New Jersey, Brion calls to mind the Garden State's favorite son, Bruce Springsteen, by playing the opening riff of "Born to Run" on bells. The Chamberlain on "Jacob Marley's Chain" hints at Aimee's one-time songwriting partner Elvis Costello.
Former 'Til Tuesday drummer and Aimee's current manager Michael Hausman offers that Jon's strength is that "he tries to create that magical feeling in the studio that you sometimes get in music...and if it's not there, he'll keep looking for it until he gets it."
"Jon is an incredibly talented musical genius, and an amazing multi-instrumentalist," Aimee adds. "He can play anything and it always sounds right. The joke in the studio while we were recording 'Whatever' was that he could pick up somebody's half-emptybeer bottle and blow into it and it would be in key with the song we were working on.
"Some producers are there to keep track of budgets and schedules and then there is Jon on the other end of the spectrum. He is so into the music that that is all he thinks about. Which can be bad for the budget, but great for the music," Aimee concludes.
As of this writing, Brion was producing a new album for Rufus Wainwright .
This article Copyright 1998 by Daniel Levitin. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or class room use is granted with or without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on services, or to redistribute to lists, requires specific permission and/or a fee.
