A Well-Kept Secret

Musician/lyricist/composer a well-kept secret
Daily News
By Fred Shuster
Friday, December 15, 2000

Producer-musician Jon Brion is someone you've probably heard if not heard of.

Known by insiders as the sought-after producer of Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright as well as a session player on hit albums by the Wallflowers, Elliott Smith and the Eels, Brion also hosts one of Los Angeles' most reliable nights out.

His informal weekly shows at Hollywood's intimate Largo club have been among the town's best underground bets for years. Brion can be counted on for relaxed, eclectic evenings that often include cameos from pals like Michael Stipe, Neil Finn, Aimee Mann, Rickie Lee Jones and Michael Penn.

Even while working on the orchestral score for Paul Thomas Anderson's acclaimed epic, "Magnolia," Brion -- popular in recording studios for his collection of vintage keyboards -- continued his residency at the Fairfax Avenue nightspot, where his performances often give way to song-sharing sessions until the wee hours.

"There's no set list and people do drop by but it's not like an open mike or blues jam," Brion said. "We'll do songs people know but in a more intimate manner. Or it can be completely crazy avant-garde music or me taking requests. It depends on my mood. I could do my own songs all night or make up songs on the spot, depending on titles from the audience. It varies each week."

Brion and Anderson first worked together on the director's 1997 screen debut, "Hard Eight." For "Magnolia," Brion penned the evocative score and produced many of the extensive soundtrack contributions made by Mann.

"Jon is one of those musical-genius types," Anderson said. "So when it came time to create an hour and a half worth of orchestral score for the movie, I came to Jon. In other words, Jon was asked to write a few full symphonies."

For his part, Brion recalls his scoring technique as surprisingly simple.

"I watched Paul watching the film," he said. "We sat together in a room and I would work out what he wanted by watching the visual cues he provided me as he responded to what was happening on screen."

Brion's reputation in the biz began growing in the early '90s when he was often called to sessions not for his Beatlesque pop spirit but for his collection of barely working synthesizers from decades past.

The interest in vintage keyboards started early. Growing up in New Haven, Conn., the son of a mom who sings and an orchestra-conductor dad, Brion was exposed to family friends who experimented with the then-revolutionary Moog synth.

"I began looking for instruments that had a humane quality," Brion explained. "I began collecting vibraphones and old recording gear. I would put on records I loved, like the Beatles, and try to figure out how they managed to be so populist and creative and artistic. Those elements don't ordinarily collide but they do on those records."

It's rare for a behind-the-scenes guy like Brion to have a public persona. But at the Largo each Friday, the in-demand producer mixes pop standards by the Beatles and the Beach Boys, campy '80s tunes and his own often skewered songs for crowds of friends and admirers.

"I have an odd career," the Hollywood-based Brion, 36, admits. "I'm a musician who doesn't specifically make hit records even though I've been involved in some. When I'm producing, my main thing is lyrics. I'll sit around and obsess about the words and question if the music is giving proper support to them."

Along with studio work for others, Brion has completed a solo album, "Meaningless," which is so far unreleased. A compilation of material recorded live at Largo may also come out someday.

And despite his renown in the industry, Brion doesn't even have a manager -- nor does he want one.

"It's really very simple," he says. "Over the years, people like lawyers and managers have told me I should focus on just one thing, either be an artist or producer. I always hear if there's an opportunity that comes along that could make a lot of money, I should do it. But I believe if I want to go off and produce someone -- whoever it is -- it's not going to be detrimental to my career. It's hard to get these concepts across to people. I make the big-picture decisions on my life.

"And ever since I've taken control of that, I quite like the life I have."

Spontaneous Combustion

Spontaneous combustion
By Joan Anderman

It's Friday night, and Jon Brion is doubled over, looking a bit mad about the eyes. He's fiddling with the knobs on a box that sits on the floor. The box begins to produce sounds - at first a gauzy sort of scratching, then a steady stream of woolly beats. Brion fusses for a good long time, sampling and adjusting, twisting and turning, hunting for some elusive blend of texture and rhythm. It's clear that he has no idea where he's going; one can only hope he'll know it when he gets there.

Brion, however, is cheerfully oblivious. The fact that a standing-room-only audience is watching him fumble toward a song doesn't seem to be cause for concern. Finally satisfied with the swarm of frayed sound loops he's managed to coax from the box, Brion raises his lanky body and turns his attention to a Yamaha home organ perched on the tiny, cluttered stage.

We are in a Hollywood nightclub called Largo, but the nondescript storefront surrounded by Fairfax Avenue's kosher delis and bagel bakeries is as unassuming as the mop-topped fellow messing around onstage. It's a plain, square room filled with small tables, bar along the back wall, lights down low. No one is talking on a cell phone or blowing air kisses. There are no clusters of scenesters trying to be heard over the performance they just paid to see. Everyone is ... listening.

Brion runs the old organ through a couple of fuzz boxes, making the usually braying keyboard squeal and sparkle. Suddenly a lush melody pours off the stage, and Brion's eyebrows rise with the swell of gorgeous notes. He seems to have surprised himself and quickly stretches for another keyboard. Now a sound like tuned gusts of wind blows between the notes and out over the hushed crowd.

"Somebody give me a title. Preferably for a song that hasn't been written," Brion pleads. He is drinking Guinness and coffee, the poor man's speedball, and promises to ride this beverage until he starts playing in tune. Song titles fly from the audience, and Brion considers the offerings: "Love Canal." "Going, Going, Gone." "Shiny Coat Bar." He's laughing, and then he's off.

In the span of a few minutes, Brion gives birth to a tune called "Dashboard." It's all pinging beats, softly distorted guitar, and Brion's voice sliced into a dozen perfect layers, courtesy of another little box called a harmonizer. The song is as close to a piece of pop heaven - a little bit Beach Boys, a dash of Elvis Costello, haunting echoes of the Beatles - as you can imagine emerging after days of laborious composing, let alone cobbling on the spot. The words tumble out unhesitatingly, in verse, although one would be hard pressed to say exactly what "Dashboard" is about. No matter - it will never be sung again.

Brion is on a roll now. He transforms the rock anthem "Itchycoo Park," by the Small Faces, into a dance-hall ditty. Next, he offers his idea of a love song, revealingly titled "You Can Still Ruin My Day." Then he reworks "Happiness," the first single from folk-punk songwriter Elliott Smith's upcoming CD.

And then, without warning, a remarkable pageant begins to unfold. One by one, a veritable who's who of music crams into Largo's little performance space.

British rocker Robyn Hitchcock leaps into Brion's arms and spews a string of incoherent rants into the microphone, capped by a cathartic take on David Bowie's "All the Young Dudes." Hitchcock and Brion are joined in short order by alt-rock hero Grant Phillips (of Grant Lee Buffalo), who has been sitting cross-legged on the floor at the base of the stage. Later, Neil Finn, from Crowded House, and Heartbreaker Benmont Tench, Tom Petty's keyboard player, emerge from a corner booth to join them, as does Wendy Melvoin (from Prince's band), who grabs a bass, and the illustrious pianist Mitchell Froom (who has produced albums for everyone from Los Lobos to Richard Thompson to Froom's former wife, Suzanne Vega). Froom's girlfriend, Vonda Shepard (Ally McBeal's musical alter ego), sings harmonies under her breath from a table in the back. Finally, at about 2 a.m., Elliott Smith saunters down the back stairs and onto the stage, where Brion bullies him into singing the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset."

Literally elbow-to-elbow, the spontaneously generated supergroup barrels through a raucous stream of covers pitched by the audience: "I Love Rock and Roll," "I Saw Her Standing There," "Jumping Jack Flash," "Heartbreak Hotel," and "Sunshine Superman." Brion is giddy and grinning, even a little insane-looking. The tiny stage looks as if it might cave in, not so much from the physical weight but from the sheer collective creative heft.

This is by far the coolest live show in LA. And its roots stretch cross-country, all the way to Boston's Kenmore Square.

In an age of factory-generated entertainers, mass-marketed style, and connect-the-dots hits, Jon Brion is a true original. He walks the high wire on Friday nights at Largo with his spontaneous compositions, but his influence spans the music world as a film composer, recording-studio guru, and master pop craftsman.

Since moving West from Boston nine years ago, Brion has slowly and surely infiltrated the Los Angeles recording industry, long dominated by guitar-slinging technicians and soulless programmers. He drives to recording sessions in his dented Volvo, laden with guitars and chamberlins, harmoniums and sighing machines, drums and basses, mandolins and music boxes. (He is, to clarify, a multi-instrumentalist.) Artists as wildly diverse as the Wallflowers, Nine Inch Nails, Macy Gray, Melissa Etheridge, the Eels, Taj Mahal, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, and David Byrne have called on Brion to contribute a sound that's simultaneously indefinable and signature. If that sounds like an oxymoron, it is. Brion has become unofficially known as "that weird-instrument guy."

A work day might go something like this: Walk into a session where he's been hired to play tambourine for two minutes, mention discreetly that he really just hears a vibraphone in the chorus, and maybe marimba and toy piano on the verse, and in the course of the afternoon he lays down 20 tracks of instruments.

Last year, Brion wrote the beautifully haunting score for Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia and finished work on his own solo album, Meaningless. At around the same time, VH1 filmed a pilot for a series based on the Largo shows. In the last couple of years, Brion has produced stunning albums for Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, and Fiona Apple that are as quirky as they are classic. In the bargain, Brion finds himself at the forefront of a renaissance in smart, spirited pop music.

For all his brilliant work as a hired hand, though, it's the Friday night residency that crystallizes Brion's musical raison d'etre and puts him at the epicenter of LA's new-Bohemian music culture. At Largo, there are no set lists, no guidelines, no forethought whatsoever. The concept is simple: an evening of spontaneous music by Brion and a revolving cast of talented guests. It's like a pop-music salon - a sonic Algonquin round table for the post-Beatles set.

It was just a few months ago that Beth Orton and Beck showed up at Largo's side door, guitars in hand. Neil Young, Michael Stipe, and Elvis Costello have dropped by. Rickie Lee Jones and Fiona Apple are regulars. But it's Brion, a New Haven native and former Bostonian, who leads the charge through these uncharted waters - armed with a passion for the vintage retro pop of the Beatles and Beach Boys and an insatiable desire to find newer and odder and more beautiful ways to build a song.

It might involve a 40-minute version of John Coltrane's take on "My Favorite Things," or a hushed sing-along of "God Only Knows," or a surf rendition of "Riders on the Storm." Brion once yanked a mariachi musician off the sidewalk to play with him. Odds are good he'll play an ending three times, just because it sounds cool. There's always a handful of Brion's winsome, literate originals on tap and no shortage of instant music.

It's no small trick, this composing on the spot or spearheading these rambling, shambolic musical affairs. For Brion, it's nothing short of a prerequisite, and he discusses his philosophy of modern pop with missionary zeal. In fact, it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that Brion is on a mission from ... well, who knows. We are ingesting caffeine at Stir Crazy on Melrose a few days after the show.

"The notion that we should be excited about a performance because it has two distorted guitars, a bass and drums, and hopefully a charismatic lead singer, doing their marvelous three to five pieces of music, is atrocious," says Brion. Thirty-seven years old, gangly and baby-faced, Brion is the picture of cheesy vintage-chic in green corduroy and plaid. It's clear after 10 minutes of conversation that he's the type who has always been too smart, too outspoken, too original for his own good. History bears this out: Twenty years ago, Brion was the whip-smart kid who failed so miserably in school that he wound up in special-ed classes. Today, he's the gifted songwriter who can't get his record released.

"I know a lot of the things that I like, like improvisation, have classically been referred to, especially in the postpunk world, as self-indulgent. But I'm sorry. I don't think that performing the same songs every night is even slightly considerate," Brion says. "When you're doing that, you are basically turning off your subconscious and turning off your own enthusiasm. And no matter how much gusto you try to play with every night, there's a spark that's missing. That spark comes from the moment of discovery, which is not a repeatable thing."

Which brings us to the verbal brawl at the breakfast joint in Kenmore Square a decade ago, with musician friends Aimee Mann, Buddy Judge, and Ron Baldwin.

Brion: Wouldn't it be great if there was somebody who never did the same set, ever?

Friends: It would suck.

Brion: It's gotta be hypothetical. A hypothetical performer who wrote all the songs on the spot.

Friends: Yeah, but then the songs would suck.

Brion: Please, hypothetical argument. Let's say the songs were as good as any Burt Bacharach/Cole Porter/Beatles/Hank Williams song. You name it. As good as anything. And they never repeated it. I say that you'd go see that all the time.

Brion, who recounts the conversation with glee, is quick to clarify: "I can't write like any of the people mentioned. But once I started doing the Largo thing, I realized that it was my opportunity to show that this can work. There are people who have seen over a hundred shows of mine. What's beautifully ironic is that after Aimee moved out here, she started coming every week [to Largo], and all she ever wanted to hear were songs made up on the spot. She would come with a list of titles she had been thinking up all week to throw at me. It was her favorite thing."

Talk to his friends, and Brion's Boston years would seem to be characterized by crashing on people's couches. "He lived on our sofa for a year and a half" when he arrived in Boston, recalls Mike Denneen, owner of Q Division, Boston's premier studio and record label. "When he got his own apartment, half the free world rejoiced."

Denneen and Brion played together in a band called the World's Fair, which did only a handful of gigs around town at the Rat and other area clubs. Mostly, Brion says, he spent his Boston years "obsessively writing songs and recording and gigging around town, helping Aimee out."

Brion speaks of Aimee Mann, the former lead singer for the band 'Til Tuesday, often and with great feeling. They met shortly after Brion moved to Boston in 1987 and are longtime collaborators and kindred musical spirits. Brion produced Mann's first two solo albums as well as the soundtrack to Magnolia, a collection of Mann compositions that Paul Thomas Anderson says inspired him to write his Academy Award-nominated movie. Brion and Mann were also lovers for much of the four years that he lived in Boston. (Mann is now married to singer-songwriter Michael Penn, actor Sean Penn's brother.)

Everything, Brion says, happened at Q Division. "Q was central to my creative life; it was the central creative place in a lot of people's lives. I'd play on things Mike was producing, and he'd engineer things I was producing. Not that there was a lot of session work in Boston. If you got $50, you were absolutely amazed." It was, however, the start of a working relationship and friendship that continue to this day. Brion and Mann returned to Q Division last year to record much of the Magnolia soundtrack, which Denneen engineered.

Anyone who's spent time with struggling musicians can attest to the fact that a large proportion tend to leave the television on a lot; it seems to function as some sort of comforting white noise, an equalizer, perhaps, to mediate the racket in their heads. For Brion, though, whose learning style has always been slightly left of alternative, vegging in front of the tube was an academic experience.

"In Boston, I used to watch TV with an unplugged electric guitar, on the couch, and commercials would come on, and I'd try to play along. It was one of the prime things I concerned myself with for several years, getting to the point where if I heard it, I could play it. You know, 'We're American Airlines....' " Brion sings and hums the rest of the jingle enthusiastically. "Then I started working on getting my brain to do multiple things at once. And having my hands translate them."

"He's a musical genius," Denneen says. "He can hear counterpoint in his head in less time than it would take to have it come out in the air. He can spatially visualize in his mind how lines will interweave. He has complete command of basically anything he has ever heard. No one knew what to do with him." That theme - of simultaneously being awed by Brion's gifts and not having a clue how to translate them into the mortal world - crops up again and again when talking with label executives, television producers, and colleagues. Denneen agrees that it's an archetypal artistic dilemma.

"He lives improvisation," says Denneen. "It's a daily way of life for Jon. His best creative work is when he's playing unconsciously, therefore the first thing that comes out of him is almost always amazing. But when we played in the World's Fair together, if you weren't ready to turn on a dime . . ." Denneen's voice falls off, suggesting disaster.

They were lean but fruitful years, Brion says, laboring to make the musical connection between his head and his hands and honing the art of distilling 30 years of pop songcraft and an obsession with jazz improvisation into a sound he could call his own. "Like everyone else, I just scraped by. But there were a lot of things that were very important to me about Boston," Brion says. "There was culture in Boston. I met intelligent people of all stripes. And I didn't have to walk around in defense posture, like I would have had to do in New York." Brion seriously considered moving back to Boston in 1993, after two years in Los Angeles. He returned often during the next year and a half, working on Mann's second solo album and sleeping, once more, on people's couches.

"I love Boston. I missed the architecture. I missed all kinds of things," Brion says. "When I visited, I would go to a party with friends and meet people and instantly have a two-hour conversation that I enjoyed." But the work in LA started trickling in, and there was precious little to be found in Boston. Just as he was poised to return East for good, "I got some calls to play on some sessions," Brion recalls. "It just started to snowball. And it turned into an avalanche."

The way LaRue Brion remembers it, her third child's predilection for music was apparent early on. "When other kids were batting their mobiles, Jon was sort of organizing little percussion ensembles with the rattles," says LaRue Brion, who recently retired as administrative assistant at a Yale residential hall and once sang in jazz bands. Brion's father, Keith, was director of the Yale concert and marching bands, and his siblings, Randy (now 43 and an orchestrator/arranger in LA) and Laurie (a violinist, 41), were both avid music students. By preschool, Brion was performing the Beatles catalog in a spot-on English accent. The Beatles are, to this day, the most obvious and pervasive influence on his music.

When it came time to start kindergarten, LaRue Brion recalls, "Jon was bitter. It cut into his drumming time." That same year, 1967, the family went to hear the New York Philharmonic perform Mahler's 9th Symphony. LaRue didn't think Jon would make it through the first movement. Much to her surprise, the boy didn't utter a peep. "He listened. He just listened." She still has Jon's kindergarten autobiography, in which he instructed his teacher to write down two sentences: "I am Jon Brion. I am a musician."

"Everything he did to learn music defied everything I knew," says Keith Brion, who works as a freelance symphony orchestra/pops conductor and leader of a John Philip Sousa band in California. "He was a Suzuki violin dropout. He had one or two drum lessons. He didn't take well to instruction. It just didn't ...work." Instead, Jon crawled under pianos, lodged behind drum sets, and listened. By the time he started junior high, Brion was skilled on piano and guitar and something of a drum prodigy. He had also become obsessed with jazz. At 12, Brion began sitting in with visiting jazz musicians like Benny Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, and Slam Stewart in New Haven clubs at the invitation of Willy Ruff, who ran the Ellington program at the Yale School of Music.

"Jon had studied old jazz records from the time he was a small child," says LaRue Brion. "He knew all the original arrangements. And he remembers every note he's ever heard." Keith Brion says he never heard Jon play the same eight bars twice. "We're talking about a 7- or 8-year-old kid. Usually a kid will play a pattern, over and over, and then play another pattern. Jon always twisted and turned."

Like many intensely creative kids, Jon Brion was a dismal student. "I had terrible study habits," recalls Brion, who wound up in a special-education class at Hamden High School with mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed kids. "Eventually, the teacher said to me, "I don't know if you realize what kind of trouble you're in. There's no place lower than this.' I was 14 or 15 at the time, but I was very conscious of the fact that every day there were six hours that I wasn't listening to records or playing music. Every day I spent in school was a day I wasn't working on my life's work." Or as Keith Brion puts it, "He wasn't rude or rebellious. The music in his head was just louder than whatever was going on in the classroom."

Brion wasn't a troublemaker, per se. He simply refused to pick up a pencil. "He wouldn't write anything," marvels LaRue Brion. "He sat in the cafeteria and drank tea." It would seem that Brion's penchant for improvisation was entrenched early on. Even now, he eschews the written note for the intuitive one. "We took him to psychologists and neurologists, and we finally just let him have his head, because we knew he was learning. We also knew that music was his destiny. If he hadn't had that, we probably would have been stricter or sent him to a private remedial school."

Brion credits his special-ed teacher with getting him through. "I finally told her that I had to do my work. I told her about music, and that if I didn't do it, I just knew it would be a waste of time. She shut up and left the room, and the next day she came in - this was one of the great experiences of my life - and she said, 'You're an artist. You know me as a teacher, but that's what I do to survive. I'm actually a painter.' She convinced the board of education to let her become my personal tutor for the rest of the semester in English and history. We met and talked. She basically got me through."

The Excerpts, Brion's high school band, was into the brainy pop groups of the day: Squeeze, the Buzzcocks, XTC. The band played clubs around New Haven but broke up during its first big gig, a monthlong tour of Japan in 1983, when Brion was 19. "We were like jealous girlfriends," says Dean Falcone, one of the band members. "Jon always had his hands in other things. He didn't just play our kind of music, and he was stifled. I mean, he'd play us his demos, and we'd try to play the music, and it was a nightmare. He was just so talented."

Keith Brion, who worked professionally with his son for the first time when Jon called him to play piccolo on a Magnolia session, was, and is, confounded and astounded by his son. It wasn't easy for an academic with multiple degrees in music education to raise such a fiercely unconventional child. But the day Jon turned 17, his father went to Hamden High, signed his son out for the last time, and they went for a celebratory breakfast at McDonald's. Jon has earned his living as a musician ever since.

"I've thought about it once or twice," Jon Brion says of never finishing high school. "But the longer I live, the more I feel indignant about the whole education thing. It was all about square blocks and square holes and fitting things together. It was the most offensive thing in the world. I feel like I've known what I was going to do with my life since I was about 7."

Brion's difference, his ill fit with conventional society, is, in the most cliched sense, his blessing and his curse. That utter lack of inclination to service the musical or commercial appetite of anyone other than himself has resulted in a brilliant and relatively anonymous career. It explains why - in an industry that values the easy sell over creative depth - Brion is the hippest guy you've never heard of.

"Unlike Kid Rock, I'm not gonna spend two years repeating the same song so people know me for the sake of me becoming famous so that I can become a Famous Person," Brion declares. "But I would not object to what I do becoming widely known. Fame would be a really handy thing for a lot of stuff I'm interested in doing. But they wouldn't be the typical things."

Nothing about Brion's life, it seems, is typical. Last we spoke, in May, he and his girlfriend of three years, comedian Mary Lynn Rajskub, were holed up in a small motel in Hollywood. They had had to leave their rented house and had not yet found a new place. His phone number referred callers to a friend's cell phone. Outside of writing, playing, performing, and watching other people perform, Brion's main interest is talking to people. He is not a sportsman, and he hates board games. He fantasizes about going on the road with a miniature band. "I have a miniature piano from the turn of the century," he says. "I've got a tiny drum set and a tiny guitar."

The two big mainstream projects he's attempted - a solo album of pop music and The Jon Brion Show for VH1 - have both derailed. Brion signed a record deal with Lava, an Atlantic Records subsidiary, in 1997. Over the next two years he recorded not one, not two, but three versions of his album Meaningless, all of which were rejected. The label finally gave him his walking papers, and his record back, last fall.

Brion tried to get the album out on the Internet, through the ArtistDirect Web site, but it turns out that an overenthusiastic fan in the Midwest had registered all the obvious Web domain names for Jon Brion - a situation that is still unresolved.

"I called and told him he'd created a beautiful piece of work. I said it was a work of art," says Jason Flom, president of Lava/Atlantic Records, who has enjoyed successes with Sugar Ray, Matchbox 20, and Kid Rock. "But I wasn't sure a major label could do this particular record justice." In other words, the label couldn't figure out how to market Brion's music in any of the handful of stylistic niches that define mainstream, major-label commerce.

"It's a weird one for me," says Flom, "because I'm a fan. I mean, Jon Brion couldn't make a bad record. If he decides that what he craves is mainstream acceptance, he'll make an album that could be tremendously successful. He could come up with a fantastic album that wouldn't sacrifice his credibility. It's just that he does whatever he wants to, whenever he wants. I'm not sure he isn't happiest doing what he's doing now: Largo, and producing [other artists], and writing movie scores."

For his part, Brion holds no grudges. He understands all too well how he fits, or doesn't fit, into the business model to which popular music is bound. Happily, Brion has no need for a day job. He's a busy session player, a film score composer, an in-demand music producer. "I like," Brion says with the guileless verve of one who actually can do it all, "doing everything. But would I like to be able to play my songs in nice theaters? Absolutely. It requires a certain amount of notoriety for the Bjorks and Tom Waitses and Neil Youngs and Elvis Costellos of the world to get away with the things they are doing. They're lucky to be making records."

Those artists are the exception to the rule, however. By and large, music fans have evolved into separate, narrow camps of followers: the Britney nation, the hip-hop nation, etc. And when it comes to music programming on networks like MTV and VH1, everything outside of those narrow camps has, for all intents and purposes, been squeezed out of existence.

Take the ongoing saga of The Jon Brion Show. Last spring, VH1 shot a pilot for what was originally intended to be a one-hour format based on the Largo shows. Michael McNamara, who produced the pilot, says, "It was like trying to put fireflies in a jar."

Without consulting Brion or McNamara, VH1 edited the pilot down to a half-hour, essentially compressing musical interactions that are meant to unfold into something more like promotional sound bites. There are some priceless moments: Brion performing a bossa nova version of Jethro Tull's "Aqualung" on banjo. Rickie Lee Jones reenacting how she played with her Barbie doll as a child while singing along to the Beatles' "Anna." Brion bringing unrecognizable instruments to a Cheap Trick session and jamming with street musicians on the Venice Beach boardwalk. But the pilot tested poorly with focus groups, and VH1 dropped plans to produce the show. In April, Brion shot another version of the pilot, one he says is much more intimate and successful. He plans to shop it to cable networks.

Nothing is settled. The album, the TV show, the living arrangement ... But Brion - a man who eagerly eschews the familiar destination for the bumpy journey, a man who would rather hear someone bang sincerely on the side of a suitcase than listen to a well-rehearsed drum solo - is preternaturally comfortable inhabiting limbo. It's what feeds his creative spirit and in turn makes his musical contributions so singular.

So what's a gifted, thwarted, revered, misunderstood musician to do? Here's an idea: Ring in the millennium playing Edison cylinder, electric guitar, and a few music boxes on the second "L" of the Hollywood sign. As Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and talk-show host Jay Leno flipped the switch on 2.7 million watts of electricity to light up the landmark at midnight, Brion proceeded to play "Auld Lang Syne" in 1,000 years of musical styles. Six cameras beamed the festivities to the rest of the globe.

Chances are good that hardly anyone in San Pedro, or Seoul, or Paris knew who the grinning musician perched on the Hollywood hillside was. "The only thing I can guess," Brion muses, "is that somebody at a production company in town was going, 'OK. We've got a job. It involves a musician, and it's strange. Who do we get?' "

Producer's Corner: Jon Brion

Producer's Corner: Jon Brion
Performing Songwriter magazine
by Paul Zollo
Jul/Aug 2000

On my outgoing answering machine message there's a short musical passage, only a few measures long, but one of the most haunting pieces of music ever recorded. Few people have any clue what it is, nor should they. But when Jon Brion calls back, after hearing it only once, he identifies it perfectly: "Chet Baker, one of his last recordings, on Elvis Costello's 'Shipbuilding,' 1983." Later I check the year. Of course, he's right. This is a guy who knows his music.

Which is one of the reasons he's so much in demand. Not only as a producer, but also as a multi-instrumentalist session player, songwriter, and now film composer, having recently scored Magnolia. He's produced albums by Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, and Robyn Hitchcock, and had just embarked on a new David Byrne solo project when we spoke. His ability to wed a vast vocabulary of musical knowledge with a tremendous and joyful energy, intimately coloring and molding the sounds of albums around the songs and personalities of artists, has transformed Jon Brion into one of the hottest producers around. As Aimee Mann said in last December's issue of this magazine, "The secret is out on Jon now."

After talking to Brion, hearing Fiona Apple's new album, When The Pawn..., is a revelation not unlike seeing the Sixth Sense or The Crying Game again after let in on the secret. Because the secret here is that Jon Brion produced this album in a manner which reverses the typical drum-first pattern of building tracks, "That approach," Brion cheerfully affirmed, "is as much a lunacy as mine is." His approach was to record her vocals and piano first, all alone, and then craft all all the other elements -- guitars, drums, keyboards, etc.-- around that initial performance. For this reason, the album breathes with an intimacy most records never attain. It's a production style replete with warm, unexpected sounds, wondrous color shifts, and a dynamic range that sweeps through the full sonic spectrum available to humans -- from moments in "Love Ridden" that are so quiet and still that you can hear Fiona's foot on the piano pedal, to passages in "Fast As You Can" that burn so furiously it feels as they might ignite.

"When a songwriter writes something great, and knows that it is different from all the songs that preceded it, there's a tremendous energy in the performance," he says, and though it applies specifically to his work with Fiona, it's the same energy that he finds with Byrne, Mann, or any of the other artists with whom he works. He's said to come up with hundreds more ideas than necessary, but it's a profusion of creativity which is exceedingly welcome in the sometimes stifling creative environments of recording studios. "The whole thing is trying to replicate a feeling of intimacy," he says. "Maybe not actual intimacy, but that feeling. It's only in recent years that I've learned how to do that."

Much of what he's learned he's already put into practice and proved effective, even though many of his production ideas -- such as drummers should play softly while recording -- go directly against the conventional wisdom. "Conventional wisdom would also say that the records that sell the best are the best records," he adds, before laughing heartily.

An extremely talented guitarist, especially in terms of weaving together intricate parts, he's also fluid on keyboards, vibes, drums, Bouzouki, ukulele, and other instruments. Long before becoming a producer, Brion was an eminent session player who added his touch to albums by everyone from Taj Mahal to Macy Gray. Known to give far more in a single session than most session players do in a year, he's taken tracks in progress, privately layered them with a cavalcade of instrumental coloration, and handed them back to the artist and/or producer saying, "Here you are -- any of these ideas you like, use."

"I guess that's not usual session guy behavior," he says. "I never even knew how odd it was until the last couple of years. I've spoken to a few friends who are among the best all-time session people, and they play just drums, or just guitar. They don't show show up with a truck of instruments and say, "Oh it's time for xylophone now!"

We spoke on a cool, clear Angeleno afternoon, during which he devoted much energy to the pursuit of an anxious gecko that had somehow stolen into his Hollywood home, and which he repeatedly tried and failed to free. Though maybe not as momentous a project as producing Fiona Apple or David Byrne, still he gave it his full attention, which is maybe the secret to his success. When Brion works on a project, he always gives his all to it, even when his motives are misread. "He keeps looking at me like I might eat him," he said of the elusive lizard, "which, frankly, I don't want to do."

Your production of Fiona's new album is extraordinary, and matches the uniqueness and passion of her writing and singing.
That is very kind of you to say. Fiona is deeply incredible. Just really, really good. It was a pleasure every day to work on the material. She is a total dream to work with. She is the easiest, nicest, most considerate, most forthright person I have ever worked with in a production capacity. No one even comes close.

Fiona shows up on time, sings three passes of the vocal. It's amazing. She is completely articulate about her likes and dislikes. She's also able to describe why, in terms of the song, she doesn't think something works emotionally. A lot of people don't have that talent, and come shell-shocked from bands or producers they've worked with, and not necessarily open to ideas. There are a lot of people who, simply because an idea is not their own, are not perceptive to it. She doesn't suffer from any of that.

Her songs seem conceived in full conjunction with the production.
I love that you've said that. After she wrote all the songs for the album, she handed me a folder with ten songs, handwritten lyrics, the full album title, already in place, and said, "I want to sit down and play these, and then we can talk afterwards rather than talking after each song." And she played me an album. I sat Indian-style at the foot of this upright piano and she played this stuff. And walloped me. It was so fantastic.

After she finished, she said, "I think I have figured out what I'm good at. I write pretty well, I'm a good singer, and I can play my songs well enough on piano. You're good at everything else. So I think that's how we should proceed, and if we are ever off-base, I'll let you know." And that is exactly what she did.

I bring this up because people hear certain things on the record and assume I came up with them. Like all the time-changes in "Fast As You Can." All that stuff was there. All I did was to heighten pre-existing things. In terms of the color changes, I am coordinating all of those, but the rhythms are absolutely Fiona's.

So you would create the album around her performances, and then play her what you did later?
Pretty much. We tracked vocal and piano to a click track, and then I brought in two drummers we both love, Matt Chamberlain, who is amazing, and also Jim Keltner, one of my favorite musicians of all time. We got the basic tracks and then I would experiment.

She would come in for three hours every day. She would come in, sing, and then listen to what I had done the night before. We would sort through it, and usually she would like about 80% of it. And with the other 20% I would say, "Okay, let me try something else."

Was there any pattern to the things she didn't like?
It was always song-based. A lot of people come in with different manifestos, which are sometimes just reactionary things, like, "I don't want any drum kits in the studio." She doesn't have that. It was a song-by-song basis, and we always discussed things from an emotional perspective. She didn't say, "I don't think B-flat is the right note." We always discussed it in terms of the songs. Like "Okay this section of the song is remorseful. And that sound doesn't evoke that for me. And here's why -- I think it's too bright in this way, and too jaunty in this way." And I would invariably think she was absolutely right. She obviously has very good emotional instincts to write that way. So at some point you have to respect the instincts of the artist.

How much would the lyrical content of her songs affect the production?
Without question, it's the single most important thing. But I am a songwriter first. All good musicians I know are obsessed with lyrics.

That vocal she would lay down with piano -- would you use that as the final vocal?
Sometimes. She is easily one of the most natural singers I have ever recorded. It is nothing for her to do what she does. Occasionally it would change, but not too often, because the production was tailored to the song and to the vocal. I think the vocal is the most important thing on the record, followed by the way the record feels and then how it's colored. That's the hierarchy. Performance first, sonics second.

Would she play piano and sing at the same time?
Sometimes. We worked on that, because I wanted a very solid foundation since we were to add drums after the fact.

The conventional approach to recording, of course, is to get the basic tracks down, which means getting a good drum track and then basing everything on that --
I wouldn't recommend it for most people. But every record should be different. And at the point where humans are not really around playing together, it's all illusion, so it becomes almost a moot point.

Often when you do the drums first, that can result in a less creative drum track. People try to get drum tracks as metronomically right and as high fidelity as possible. And I actually don't like the way records made that way feel. I like to hear drummers playing with the songwriter.

I also like to hear the songwriter's basic instrument on track. Because if you have the songwriter playing it on whatever instrument they are writing it on, you have the DNA of everything in there. Every time. Any time I have ever been in the studio, and we're having problems with the groove, I tell the songwriter to go pick the instrument they wrote the song on. Invariably, all the dynamic information, all the architectural information, all of the subtle groove implications and any weird, little, double-timey implications in the groove -- it's all there. There was something that got them to write the song in the first place.

Yet it's common for producers to eliminate the songwriter's instrument from the track, the thinking being that you can always get a better musician to play it.
Right. But, of course, there's another philosophical way of looking at it, which is that there is no more perfect one. There can't be. There can be a tighter one, but there can't be a closer one to what made the song happen.

With Fiona, did you ever discuss production ideas in advance?
Sometimes. As soon as she played "Fast As You Can," I knew exactly what I wanted it to be. I knew I wanted it to be Matt Chamberlain on drums. He can play all this beautiful machine-influenced stuff, but with human feel. I had a little keyboard in my kitchen, so I played Fiona this very busy bass line idea I had to go with this groove Matt would do. She got completely excited and said, "That's great! That feels exactly like it!"

When she made her first record, she did that classic thing of being around the studio for 12 hours a day. She didn't want to do that again, because she felt she didn't make good decisions after a few hours. And it was true. Her attention span to emotional detail in music is about three hours. But for three hours she was there, she would get more done than most people I know could get done in twelve.

So that was another reason for doing the piano and vocals first. It was to get her stuff done, so I could bring in Matt and work on something during the day, and she would come in at night, listen to what we had done, and if she wanted to make changes, he would be there and the sound would be up and we would do it. It was all fairly organic. She'd be checking in during the process, but I also had her complete trust and complete freedom.

Did you ever ask her to do demos of the songs for you?
No. I don't think demos should exist.

Why?
Because there is a beautiful, magical thing that happens when you allow your subconscious to be part of the work you do. When you are recording, your first take or first few takes of a song are the only chance where that happens. Immediately thereafter the conscious mind is involved, you've heard the recording of your voice track, you're now working towards a particular conscious aim. And how often do people play "Chase the Demo"? They never quite revive the magical feeling of the night they wrote the song.

Most of the best songs I have ever recorded were written while the album was being made. So that the songwriter says, "Oh, I just wrote this, can we put this down?" When it's that fresh and I hear all that emotional excitement in there, I get excited and I can basically finish all the overdubs in one session, as soon as the songwriter is done singing. That happened on both Aimee Mann albums I did. She'd say, "I've got a new song -- can I record it?" We'd put it down, vocal and guitar, I'd put most of the overdubs on it, and later drums. Most of the overdubs were put on probably forty minutes after she was done putting on the vocals.

Aimee spoke to us recently about working with you, and said that you generate so many ideas that if she picks up on only one-tenth of them, she can do pretty well.
That's nice. To me, setting up that place where ideas are being generated, that's something that creative people respond to, and it begets more ideas. Once you have that going, then the intuition has to kick in because you have to start making snap decisions. Suddenly if there are ten possible ways things can go, you're not sitting around in a malaise going, "Which one?" You're kind of excited because there is an energy in the air, and you start making fast decisions, which means better decisions.

Going for Baroque

Going for Baroque
CDNOW
By Allison Stewart
March 14, 2000

Jon Brion never figured his orchestral score for Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia would amount to much. Aimee Mann's soundtrack had thus far gotten the majority of the media attention, resurrecting her career and earning her an Academy Award nomination in the bargain; Brion, the producer of such recent works as Fiona Apple's When the Pawn . . . and Rufus Wainwright, and a gifted pop musician in his own right, thought his sweeping, Beach-Boys-Meets-Baroque score would never even see the light of day beyond the movie theater. He was as surprised as anybody when specially made copies of the record, pressed only for Oscar voters, started showing up on eBay. The interest in the score led to its official release.

"It was such an odd thing," Brion says. "I didn't know what people's level of interest in orchestral music was to begin with, but people would ask if they could get a copy of it, and I guess it started selling on the Internet for a whole bunch of money. For some reason, people just respond to all the music in the film. Aimee's record has done really well for her, too. Paul places the music very notably in his movies, maybe that has something to do with it."

Brion has knocked around the Los Angeles music scene for years, as a member of the early '90s, Beatles-esque outfit the Grays, as an increasingly A-list producer, and most recently as the guiding force behind the famed Friday night musical showcase at L.A. club Café Largo, which has attracted everyone from Apple to Beck to Michael Stipe. Brion's Largo gig may have raised his profile in the industry, but it hasn't made putting out his own record any easier. Atlantic Records, which had originally planned to release Brion's upcoming solo record, his first, recently released him from his contract.

"They essentially didn't hear any singles," says Brion. "It's the same old story. They looked at me as an artist who didn't want to do standard touring, and I basically wasn't someone they wanted to take a chance on. I can respect that. It's just an irony that before I could get my own record out, I put out some sort of orchestral record, you know?"

The creative shorthand between longtime friends Anderson and Brion came in handy during Magnolia's protracted birthing process. "I had a room rented, and I put a TV monitor in there, and Paul would come in, and we'd watch the movie together," says Brion, who also collaborated on the score for Anderson's first film, Hard Eight. "I would improvise to the monitor, and I would watch him as I was doing it. His shoulders would scrunch up or something, and I would know I was doing it wrong, or he would be jumping up and down, and I knew I was doing it right. He's a very dear friend, and I have a lot of belief in him, but I knew it was going to be very involved. I mean, the original version I saw was four-and-a-half hours long. I always tell friends, 'When you go see the movie, make sure you go to the bathroom before you go in.'"

"I'm not Fiona. I'm a different sort of songwriter, and people either get that or they won't."
Brion's solo album will be released online sometime in the next few months; a collaboration with Grant Lee Phillips, frontman for the now-defunct Grant Lee Buffalo, will likely follow. Famed for his exquisite musical tastes as well as his ability to wring hits out of others, Brion sees the irony in his inability to make a hit record of his own. "It is ironic, but also I'm a writer, so I'll have my own take on things," he says. "I'm not Fiona. I'm a different sort of songwriter, and people either get that or they won't. Most songwriters on the planet are struggling creatures by nature. It's very tough to do that with your life, to make recordings in the first place, and then to get the recordings out, and to get them promoted, and then to guarantee people are gonna hear them; by nature it's a tough thing. So honestly, all of this doesn't faze me a whole lot."

Three Ring Circus

Jon Brion: Three Ring Circus
Atomic Pop
February 1, 2000
Jet Lounge

When Jon Brion first steps onto the Largo stage each Friday night, he looks mild mannered enough, but about 37 minutes into his show, he transforms into a raving lunatic. While playing an upright piano, he grabs a microcassette recorder to dictate a guitar solo, kick starts a sitar practice box and then starts to sing lyrics he's found in The Complete Lyrics of Hank Williams book. Though this isn't the sure-fire way to become a pop star, it is the reason Fridays are Largo's biggest draw.

Truth of the matter is Brion nearly turned the Friday night residency offer down, mainly because he felt that was the one day of the week where he thought Flanagan could make some money. Eventually he acquiesced and Friday nights have become the club's most popular evening, with Brion being joined on stage by an array of pop music stars including semi-regulars Robyn Hitchcock and Grant-Lee Phillips, as well as visitors Michael Stipe, Fiona Apple, Beck, Beth Orton, Neil Finn or Ron Sexsmith. The beauty of a Brion evening is when he stands there alone and has to find a way to blend audience requests for the Rolling Stones, Supertramp and the aforementioned Williams.

"It's the concept of not having a set list that is really liberating," he says with a smile. "The whole point of the show is that I'm tired of watching people play the same set every night. I hate it, I really hate it."

So he threw that convention out the window and invited in the chaos theory. "The show can become whatever it wants once the beast gets going," he says.

In addition, Brion points out that he has up to 70 of his shows on tape and is trying to find the time to edit them for a pair of releases -- one filled with things that were improvised entirely on the spot and another of covers and random bits. Finding the time, though, is the key, considering the über-musician is busy producing such artists as Fiona Apple and Robyn Hitchcock, as well as working on his own collection of songs.