The Night Jon Brion Became a Human Jukebox

THE NIGHT JON BRION BECAME A HUMAN JUKEBOX
TIME MACHINE

It is Friday night, August 22nd, and Jon Brion is about to turn Largo into a pop music history classroom. After an inspired and energetic set of originals and covers, including varyingly faithful renditions of songs by Scott Joplin, Cheap Trick, Henry Mancini, The Beatles, and Gilbert O'Sullivan, Jon takes a request to play his favorite '20s song(s)... "It's Only a Paper Moon" followed by Cole Porter's "Night and Day" followed by the Gershwins' "Someone to Watch Over Me." Jon then declares that he will continue to get publicly drunk and see where that takes him. Already through the '20s, Jon decides to continue through every decade until he hits the present. An hour or so later, Jon Brion has systematically covered almost an entire century of popular music, including Benny Goodman, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Devo, Madonna, Nirvana, and Britney Spears. Upon finishing his lesson, Jon gives a politely grateful bow and exits the stage, leaving the audience almost motionless and, dare I say it, schooled.

- JAKE POSNER

Lost in the Music

Lost in the Music
The New York Times
By STEPHEN RODRICK
August 17, 2003

A few moments before his regular Friday-night show at Largo, a club in Los Angeles, Jon Brion tries to conjure a catchy name for the music he loves. As a producer, Brion has collaborated with Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann and Rufus Wainwright, constructing eccentric albums that evoke the Beatles, Aaron Copland and a pawnshop band. “If it had a label, it could help,” Brion says. He is almost 40, mop-toppish and currently without a permanent address. “Look what 'alt-country' did for Lucinda Williams and Wilco.” Sipping a Guinness, Brion comes up with one. “How about 'unpopular pop'?” he asks. He takes another sip of his beer and turns glum. “God, that's too depressing.”

Unpopular pop is a new name but not a new genre. Even when Motown and the Beatles ruled the charts, perfect pop songs -- defined by liner-note-reading geeks as intricate rhymed verse accompanied by a melody that emotionally underscores the words -- often didn't match the sales of, say, “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” The Beach Boys' “Pet Sounds” took 34 years to go platinum. Big Star, the most influential unpopular pop band in America, couldn't get its records distributed. Except for the novelty hits “Short People” and “I Love L.A.,” Randy Newman, lauded as one of the country's treasured songwriters, released a half-dozen “pop” albums in the 60's and 70's that barely earned back their advances.

Like Newman, Brion comes from a family of musicians who share a reverential appreciation for Americana music. His songs evoke images of a bygone era: a carnival organ on one track, a melancholy woodwind section on another. And like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Brion has a savantlike ability to process melodies and turn them inside out. Sam Jones, who directed the Wilco documentary “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” and is raising money for a Brion film, plays a musical game with Brion. He leaves a stretch of music by Glenn Gould on Brion's answering machine. Brion calls right back playing the piece note for note. It is talent like this that has helped make Brion a Phil Spector of unpopular pop.

Occasionally, like Newman, Wilson or Big Star's Alex Chilton, Brion has managed to make popular pop. Using a screwdriver instead of a slide, Brion created the distorted guitar lead on the Wallflowers' “One Headlight,” a single that propelled the band to multiplatinum success in 1997. The session lasted less than an hour, and Brion nailed it on the first take. Normally, he declines lengthier commercial commitments. His manager fields calls from industry heavyweights like Clive Davis requesting Brion to produce his latest ingenue. Brion always says no.

“If the songs aren't great, I can't do it,” Brion explains. “I live with these songs. They're moving through my head constantly, even when I don't want them to. If they're bad, I'm throwing myself out a window after 48 hours.”

Recording studios are dreary places: bunkers filled with wires, smudged glass partitions and ashtrays. The Paramour, where Brion is at work, is not like that. Nestled in the Los Angeles hills, the grounds resemble Norma Desmond's spread. There is an ominous iron gate, an ancient lap pool illuminated by torches at night and a garishly decorated ballroom.

Down one dark hallway, music can be heard. There are red walls, a fireplace, a Scrabble board and left-over Cuban pastries gnawed by Charlie, the Paramour's half-wolf, half-German shepherd. A Hawaiian guitar rests against some Chinese gongs. In front of a Beatles-era E.M.I. console, an Apple computer displays a screen saver of David Bowie, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp at Bowie's “Low” sessions.

It's 1 p.m., and Jon Brion is still in his pajamas and slippers. For the past three months, Brion, Tom Biller, an engineer, and the singer Fiona Apple have been living at the Paramour. Right now, Brion is noodling at a Casio keyboard, playing along to a mix of Apple's “Oh Well.” “I cried the first time I heard her play this,” Brion says. “We were at Ocean Way, Sinatra's old studio, and I just put my head down on the table and cried.”

As “Oh Well” plays repeatedly, Brion tries to conceive an arrangement that won't disturb the power of Apple's vocals. He says he thinks her delivery on the current version might be too slow for the anger of the words. To help, Brion has written out the lyrics in color-coded fashion on two giant pieces of white paper. Blue represents sad passages, red anger and green the resignation of Apple's whispering “Oh, well” in the last line.

“There's a space between this line and that line, and it's this continual sort of push and pull,” Brion says. “If she's not singing, I offer something to carry the listener through to the next moment where she returns.”

Apple's first release, fueled by her ethereal vocals and a video with her in her underwear, sold three million copies. Brion played on it, and they became close friends. After a rambling acceptance speech at the MTV awards, Apple absorbed a media assault. In 1999, she recorded the follow-up, “When the Pawn . . . ” -- the full title stretches to 90 words -- which Brion produced and played most of the instruments on. It featured a hybrid of hip-hop beats and Brion's skewed instrumentation. Like most Brion-produced projects, it was hailed by critics. And like most Brion-produced projects, it was a commercial disappointment, selling fewer than a million copies.

Apple contemplated never recording another album. Then, in the spring of 2002, Brion and Apple met for their weekly lunch. Brion had recently been ejected from a five-year relationship with the comedian Mary Lynn Rajskub. Making matters worse, the breakup occurred while he was scoring Paul Thomas Anderson's “Punch-Drunk Love.” Rajskub had a large role in the film, and Brion spent hours watching his ex on celluloid. Now finished with the score, he was at loose ends.

“Please, please make another album,” Brion begged Apple. “I need work that can save me.”

Apple agreed, and Brion went to Apple's label, Sony Music, with strict stipulations. There would be no deadline. If a Sony rep wanted to check on progress, he would have to fly to Los Angeles. Brion requested renting a wing of the Paramour rather than recording at a conventional studio. The label agreed.

In an era of industry bloodletting, Sony's acquiescence to Brion's demands demonstrates how highly respected Brion is in the industry. In addition to his production work, Brion scored Anderson's last two films, “Magnolia” (for which he also produced some of Aimee Mann's career-making tracks) and “Punch-Drunk Love.” For the latter, he helped the filmmaker in unusual ways. In an early scene, Anderson was having difficulty communicating the emotion he wanted Adam Sandler to bring to his role. He asked Brion to come down to the set. The next morning, Brion returned with a 10-minute percussion track that captured the manic anger of Barry Egan, Sandler's character. Anderson had his star listen to the track repeatedly through headphones. Sandler got it, and filming resumed.

Mr. Bonzai
Working on Fiona Apple's second album.
At the Paramour, the days effortlessly merge like the unchanging Southern California weather. Nine months after Apple played the first five songs for Brion, the album is maybe half-done. In the morning, Brion draws or works on his own songs. In the afternoon, he fiddles with backing tracks. Maybe around midnight, Apple will appear in sweats and bunny-rabbit slippers and record vocals for an hour.

“Jon's put in hundreds of more hours,” Apple said one sunny afternoon on the lawn. “If I could, I'd release this as a Jon Brion-Fiona Apple record. I keep borrowing his socks. He thinks it's because I don't have my own socks. It's because I want to be Jon Brion.”

Brion is contemplating the abandonment of all his ancillary projects so he can concentrate on his own material. Which is either brave or quixotic. Brion's only solo record was rejected by an Atlantic Records subsidiary and sold just a few thousand copies. Still, songs he has written with Mann, Evan Dando and Eels are the equal to anything they've done on their own. Every Friday night, Brion plays a sold-out show at Largo, whose guests vary from Rickie Lee Jones to Pink. He mixes Kinks and Costello songs with his own compositions. Regular attendees argue that Brion's songs compare favorably.

“Jon has at least 10 albums' worth of material,” says Mann, a longtime collaborator and a former girlfriend. “He blends the mood of the melody and the mood of the words in a way that no one else can do.” She sighs. “And he writes them so quickly.”

And yet Brion has released only one new song in the past four years, a track called “Here We Go,” a wedding song for a second marriage, on the “Punch-Drunk Love” soundtrack. If the song hadn't been dropped from the film, it might have earned an Academy Award nomination. “Why finish a song when you can start a new one?” Brion says with a laugh. “I picked the hardest art form with the least amount of respect. The economy of language you need to get emotion across is so hard. You have to find rhymed verse, then match it with a melody. And then it's dismissed just as 'a pop song.' It is so sad.”

Brion can't let go of his songs. Or the songs of his disciples. For more than a week, Brion toyed with Apple's “Oh Well.” He spent one night moving equipment to his study at the Paramour to record a guitar part. “The acoustics will pick up the reverb differently,” he explains. The next day, Brion discarded the guitar. Then he laid down another basic track with himself on drums. He wasn't happy with the result. “It sounded like a metal ballad,” Brion says. “I fired myself.” A call was placed to the legendary session drummer Jim Keltner.

“The song is missing 'it,”' Brion says. “Right now, I don't know what 'it' is. When you find it, everyone's physiology in the room changes. 'It' is a real, ephemeral thing.”

It's not uncommon to hear “it” on a Jon Brion-produced song many years after buying the album. More than a decade has passed since I first listened to Aimee Mann's “I've Had It,” from her 1993 album, “Whatever,” Brion's first major production. The subject of the song, as is often the case with Mann, is the music industry. The troops gather for a pointless New York gig as Mann muses that her chance at the brass ring may have passed. On perhaps the 400th listen, I pick up a ticking clock that moves from left to right in your headphones and underscores the fatalism of the lyrics. When Mann sings “And Dan came in from Jersey,” Brion plays the opening bars to Springsteen's “Born to Run” on a glockenspiel.

When he was 5, Brion wrote “I am Jon Brion. I am a musician” on a piece of paper. A few years later, his mother, LaRue, a club singer while in college, bought him his first Fats Waller record. Brion's father, Keith, was director of Yale University's concert and marching bands, and his parents introduced their son at age 13 to the jazz musicians Willie Ruff and Dwike Mitchell, who were known equally for their playing and for their jazz evangelism tours to China and Russia.

As he grew older, Brion refused to do any schoolwork other than music. The school district placed him in special-education classes with mildly retarded and emotionally disturbed teenagers. “I was in with a kid who had seen both her parents killed in front of her,” Brion recalls. On Brion's 17th birthday, his father signed the release papers, and Brion dropped out of high school.

At a recent Largo show, Brion began by laying down a drum track and looping it. He did the same with a jaunty piano part. He then picked up an electric guitar. He closed his eyes and resembled the kid from “Tommy” as he played a crunchy guitar part. Finally, he performed “I Was Happy With You,” a new song, picking through a melody that captures the post-anger wistful stage of heartbreak.

The next day, Brion told me that he has written a dozen new songs about his breakup. “I'm trying to approach them from a realistic point of view,” he said. “I want songs that suggest, O.K., maybe it was 60 percent your fault, but I was there, too. Those songs aren't being written.”

Another day, I heard “Citgo Sign,” which was recorded in 1991 and would not be out of place in a musical. “That may be my best album's worth of material,” Brion said. He also has notions of turning a batch of songs written since 1995 into “an Internet-only EP.” When I mentioned this to Mark Flanagan, his manager, he laughed: “You realize, that's not going to happen.”

Brion's inability to release his own songs is a hushed subject of conversation among his friends and musicians. When I asked Mann, she began: “I think he has a hard time saying anything is finished whether he's producing or doing his own songs. Jon's a perfectionist.” She hesitated and stopped. “I'm not going to say any more.”

Part of Brion's procrastination is an inability to say no. “Whenever I get a message from another musician, I know it's because they want something,” Brion says. “They want me to play on a track or produce. It's never just to say hi.”

His point was made when Grant Lee Phillips stopped by the Paramour for advice on his next album. They talked for an hour, and Brion grew increasingly animated. “You must have a great drummer -- he captures the mood of the song,” Brion advised. “You have a bad drummer, you're going to be spending days trying to find that mood.” Then, Phillips sheepishly asked, “Hey, do you want to captain this ship?” Brion said yes (though Phillips later proceeded without him).

“There's a thing called a heat sink,” Brion says. “It's a piece of metal attached to a machine. It draws heat away and keeps it from blowing up. That's what I do as a producer. It's up to me to let the artist know things are O.K. I'm the one who has to go home with the stomachache.”

Brion plays the role well. Last year, while he was producing an album for an alt-country songwriter named Rhett Miller, a real-estate agent showed up at the studio. He needed a signature finalizing the sale of the house Brion and Rajskub jointly owned. Brion excused himself, went to the bathroom and cried. Five minutes later, he was singing backing vocals on one of Miller's love songs.

Sessions with Rufus Wainwright, a talented and flamboyant piano pop singer, were turbulent. It was only the pleading of DreamWorks Records' co-chairman Lenny Waronker that kept Brion from leaving. “Rufus had all these beautiful songs, but every time the vocals would kick in, he'd write some complicated keyboard part so you couldn't hear them,” Brion says. “He wasn't interested in listening to ideas about simplifying the arrangement.”

In 2000, Brion collaborated with David Byrne. Those who heard the Brion-produced songs said they were the best Byrne had done since the Talking Heads. Byrne rejected them by fax.

I ask Brion if he has considered hiring a producer for his own work. He answers in a sad voice. “I don't have a heat sink for myself,” he says. “I don't have anyone who can tell me, 'This is good, this is a great song, let it go.' With my songs, I go home with the stomachache.”

A month later, I met up with Brion at Abbey Road Studios in London, where he was recording orchestration for Apple. He was exhausted from testing every microphone in its storied collection, cataloguing each of their shortcomings. “If I reach a point where I want a voice to sound a little fuzzy, I'll know which microphone to use,” Brion said.

In Studio 2, Brion sat behind an old piano and doodled a section from “Here We Go,” which was recorded there. “I just had the major chords, and I knew I wanted to write a song that said, Even though my heart had just been broken, I'm not going to be cynical about love,” Brion said. I remarked that the piano sounded like the one from “Fool on the Hill.” His eyes lighted up. “Because it is!” he said.

The next day, a full orchestra arrived, with “Oh Well” first up. Brion had Apple do another vocal take on which she almost growled the lyrics. He asked the violinist, Eric Gorfain, to add an arrangement. After listening to a rough mix, he offered only a little criticism. “Don't place too much activity around her voice,” Brion said. “There's nice tension in the second verse, but tension is activity that draws away from her voice, so we have to lose it.”

The next day, Brion led the orchestra through “Oh Well” for two hours. Midway through, Apple arrived. Painfully shy, she sat on the floor, covering her eyes and peeking through fingers as Brion conducted. Eyes closed, he entered a blissful state. When the music stopped, he flashed a beatific grin. “I don't think I have ever seen a human being look happier,” Apple said.

Later that night, Brion, trying to relax with a beer, was still frustrated with the song. “I can't figure it out,” he said. “It just isn't all there. Every album has a problem child. Maybe I want it to be a lawyer, when it wants to be a painter.”

Eventually, Apple's release date was pushed back from September to February. If that date holds, it will be 20 months from the time Apple played the first songs for Brion, or roughly 60 days per song. A month after the Abbey Road session, Brion told me he was done producing for the foreseeable future and will concentrate on his own songs. He even bought a powder blue van for touring. Of course, this means that songs will have to be released. For three months, Brion promised to send me demos of his new songs. They never arrived. In a final effort, I made an impromptu trip to Los Angeles. At Largo, Brion handed me a CD of seven demos. He looked miserable. The next day, I told him how much I liked them. He still seemed morose. “When the album comes out, these songs are going to be ruined for you,” Brion said. “You're not going to be able to really hear the final versions.” He grinned. “If there ever are final versions.”

The Onion: Jon Brion

Jon Brion
Interviewed by Andy Battaglia
July 2nd, 2003

the onion a.v. club, volume 39th, issue 25, july 2nd, 2003

Jon Brion doesn't possess much star power, but as a record producer, film composer, and Los Angeles music scenester, he's made his work recognizable to anyone with even a casual interest in the charts and margins. His highly collaborative production work has propped up albums by Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Macy Gray, Evan Dando, Elliott Smith, Robyn Hitchcock, Rufus Wainwright, Rhett Miller, and many others. As a film composer, he's played an integral role in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and especially Punch-Drunk Love, which drew a lot of its searing tension from Brion's alternately clanging and swooning score. Brion's métier is pop-rock, but his style burbles with quirks and ideas that are anything but straightforward—from the moody rhythmic slink of Apple's When The Pawn Hits The Conflicts... to the old-world futurism of Punch-Drunk Love to the smartly romanticized misanthropy of his own 2001 album, Meaningless. The Onion A.V. Club recently spoke with Brion about the psychology of production work, working on Punch-Drunk Love (which was recently released on home video and DVD), and that aging standby known as the "pop song."

The Onion: How did you first get involved with P.T. Anderson?

Jon Brion: When we met, it was simply that Michael Penn and I were trying to find something to collaborate on. We had talked about it for years, and Paul initially approached Michael about scoring his first film, Hard Eight. Michael at that time didn't want to score a film by himself, so he called me and essentially said, "I don't want to do this unless you're involved." Paul didn't know who I was, so he got a tape—ironically enough, Aimee Mann's version of "One" that I had produced—as an example of what I could do, and fell in love with that. He basically said, "Whatever you want to do, you're fine with me." But I told Paul when I met him, "You know, frankly, I'm not interested in becoming a film composer." The only thing that's really interesting to me about it is that it's the only place where there's a subsidy to write and record orchestra music. The NEA doesn't exist anymore, and they never liked to give grants to people who were perceived to do rock music anyway, because we're not serious enough. If I had worn turtlenecks a little more and if it was the late '70s, I probably could have gotten a grant with the right approach. But that doesn't really exist for our generation. I told Paul, "If you're ever going to do an orchestra score, I'm right there." So when Magnolia came up, he knew that's what he wanted. That's when we forged a stronger union in terms of our opinions and how we work together.

O: What did you guys share in your thoughts on music?

JB: I think our relationship is different than the average composer-director relationship. The way most of them work is the director gives the composer a videotape with time code, and the composer goes away on his lonesome, does a bunch of work, and comes back, and the director makes comments about what he likes and doesn't like. The composer goes away and primes it, makes those changes, and records it. Whereas I sort of watch Paul watching the screen, and I play keyboards as if I was accompanying a silent film. I watch his body reactions and look into his comments, and I sort of work as a compositional tool of his reactions as much as I'm making music. I kind of become an extension of his nervous system. It's a very interesting process, but it's not what I go through with too many other people. I can do it with Paul because I know he has a vision of where he wants to go, and I know that the buck stops there. The place where we really intersect is, the way I produce records and the way he directs movies are very similar in terms of overriding philosophies, where we leave things open to chance. I'm very happy to be subservient to his reactions and his vision when we're working on a movie. With Paul, it's very direct. I'm composing for him, composing for his satisfaction, and when he's satisfied, I know it's going to be something interesting.

O: Is he able to articulate to you what sort of musical language he's looking for?

JB: No, he's surprisingly inept in terms of musical terminology. But he is incredibly articulate artistically and emotionally. I'm less interested in somebody saying, "Hmm, I don't know if we should have a 7th chord there." Creatively, that's not much fun. Something Paul would often say is, "I need this to be a thread that's going to pull us to here, because this part of the movie might be tough for people to sit through. But I need them to do that, because this thing's going to happen later that's very important, and we have to get to that." Here's another thing Paul might say: "It needs to be more stomach-achy here." Musically, it's not accurate, but when I watch him watching his film, I'll have my hands on the keyboard and notice when I play a certain type of chord in a certain way, maybe his shoulders hunch up, and if that's happy and expectant, I'm on the right track.

O: The music in Punch-Drunk Love plays such a pivotal role in the film. What sort of language did you guys imagine it in before it even moved to the set?

JB: Paul knew he wanted to have a harmonium in the movie. And we knew fairly early on that we wanted a musical nod to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, in terms of there being a melody that develops in the movie that has a reference to the plot, however oblique. We also knew that we wanted some sort of romantic theme, the feeling of an old Hollywood musical without people ever breaking out into song. That's one of the many ways Paul and I fit together: We like to look around and see what things people have been neglecting or have given up on. The other thing is how outrageously corny some of the orchestra stuff is. Like when they're kissing and the strings swell, I was laughing hysterically, and he was going, "No, bigger, bigger, bigger." It still cracks me up whenever I see the movie. But there's something beautiful about that at this point, because people have gotten so far away from that that it was fresh again. It was so funny to be on sessions and conducting the orchestra and looking at the screen—it was like 1938 all over again.

O: The music is mixed incredibly high in the film. Did you play a role in that?

JB: That's all Paul. I mix most of the music in terms of the basic mixes, but Paul is absolutely in charge of everything that goes on in his movies. There are moments when the music is just so loud, and I'm like, "Oh, man, turn it down!" But he says, "No, I want people to have to struggle to hear the dialogue at that point," or "I just need this to be sensationalistic here for these few minutes because I need to set up this moment of quiet that's following," or "I want people's adrenaline to change at this point." We're so used to everything being properly manicured, like you can hear every footstep in a movie, you can hear every bit of dialogue, and everything is in its place. Most people pride themselves on doing that well, but it's one of those things he's trying to break up. I don't want to speak for him, but I do believe that in a way he feels like that's not necessarily a lifelike thing. Not that he's trying to make lifelike movies. Both he and I agree that all art is pretty much folly to begin with. But in life, you don't hear everything perfectly mixed.

O: As a producer, how do you cater your role to people on different rungs of the ladder in terms of budget, style, and popularity? You've left a pretty distinct stamp on most of the records you've produced.

JB: Yeah, I do and I don't. Is my presence felt? Yes, in that I do have to, for budget reasons, play a lot of instruments on records. That stamp is there. Though I think if you actually listen to all the records I've done, what I don't have is a particular sound. There are a lot of producers who basically have their sound, and if the artist works with them, you almost know what the record's going to sound like before it comes out. Like I think if you listen to the first Aimee Mann record I did next to the second one—same producer, same artist—they're pretty different from each other. For me, I'm interested in artists because they have some sort of individualism, so it's not like, "How am I going to make this person interesting?" Usually, what record producers have to do is work with people who are trying to make music like everybody else, so they can get attention or be successful, or they think it's a more fun job than being a CPA—you know, all the usual reasons people want to be famous or be in bands. Most of the people I'm attracted to are individuals by nature and, as writers, have some sort of means of articulating their viewpoint. I never know when we start a record what it's going to be like. We just sort of go, and we take advantage of the happenstance, and I just try to make a window for the world to see what I think is wonderful about that given artist. I try to give the world every reason to love them as much as I do. That's the big-picture part of the job for me. And, even though my reputation is that of an arranger-engineer-multi-instrumentalist guy, the real day-to-day part of my job is much more psychological. It's kind of hard to describe, and it'd be even more long-winded than my first couple of answers.

O: That's okay.

JB: Well, all humans are pretty good at getting in their own way. Some people are more fluid than others at just being themselves, and recognizing what's good about themselves. It's really tough for most artists: With recording, it's strange, because you kind of have this microscope on your psyche and on your voice. It's very weird, and it's taken me a long time to learn some of the psychological aspects of the job. It's the hardest part, but it's the most rewarding when you get it right, when you figure out what a person is trying to convey and how they're keeping themselves from fully conveying that. And get that onto a piece of tape, so that two paper cones attached to magnets vibrate and make airwaves move and hit a listener and have the listener get that idea. I think it's unbelievably beautiful. When I was younger, I looked at getting older as this process of getting less interested in things and becoming colder, and of finding less joy in the mystery of things. And I've found the exact opposite to be true. I find that I'm getting warmer, and that I'm more mystified by human interactions. I'm more mystified by how creative things work and how they affect us. I have a great deal of fun doing it, and enough people enjoy doing it with me that I can call it a career.

O: What artists have you taken an especially hands-on or hands-off approach toward?

JB: It varies within each project. The best producers I've ever seen operate so the artist doesn't even see them doing anything, and often thinks they're lazy. But all the people who get the best results are able to do that. They're able to see a few moves ahead. Sometimes I need to say absolutely nothing. Sometimes I need to leave the room for a second. Sometimes I need to pick up an instrument and play something. Sometimes I need to pick up 10 instruments and play 10 tracks of things. Whether you're supposed to be encouraging someone or distracting them, you don't know. It changes constantly. As for specific examples, God, I wouldn't know where to start, because every day, I do all of those things. That goes along with the psychological point of the job. I hate that there's an impression these days that producers are multi-instrumentalist-producer-engineer-co-writer people. It's nice to have those skills, but they just become tools. Writing for orchestra is just another tool that I can potentially bring to producing a record, but it's not the actual producing. My favorite producer of all time is John Hammond, who was the A&R guy who signed Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and Count Basie, and produced a lot of their early records. Producing Billie Holiday was simply booking the studio, helping her pick the songs, and getting the people from Count Basie's band, who at that point was only known in Kansas City. So he handpicked the members of that band that he knew would be appropriate to play with her, and pretty much let them go. He didn't have to do anything. Then, once everything was done, he picked the best takes and decided how these things could be grouped together and released. Without question, he is one of the greatest record producers who has ever lived, and the guy couldn't read a note of music. He did not play an instrument. But he embodied the job. He is what I aspire to. I'm more likely to be compared to someone like George Martin; besides the fact that I've worked with a lot of artists that have had that direct influence, I'm seen as a person who does every imaginable musical job that comes up. If the artist asks for a distorted rumba, I'll do it. But to me, George Martin was good because he had some of that John Hammond DNA. He was able to sit back when The Beatles were doing great and say, "Hey, you don't need anything else. You don't need another instrument on that song. You don't need another take. You already got it. It's fantastic." And I really admire him, because when he did assert himself, as a player or as an arranger, it was always with such fantastic results that heightened the songs to a new place. I just want to have the artist sounding at their best, whether people notice when I'm playing or not.

O: For whom do you feel you've done that best?

JB: I can't really say, but I was very happy with how happy Fiona was with her last record. She didn't feel like her first record represented her, so I was delighted that she felt she was in her best light on her last record. I'm so happy with so many of the people I've gotten to work with, because I love them so much to begin with. Robyn Hitchcock is one of the reasons I was able to survive the '80s. There weren't many things to love in the '80s. [Laughs.] I have a very close kinship with the stuff Aimee Mann and I have done together. We were kind of on a combined mission at that time in our lives.

O: Which recording project gave you the most surprising end result?

JB: Every single one of them. None of them are what I pictured in the beginning, and all of them are in some ways better and worse than what I pictured. I know that when I finished Fiona's last record, I finally felt like I was starting to understand the job well enough that I could do a complete good job. I felt I had the right amount of tools inside me to make something that was a complete experience from beginning to end.

O: She gets characterized as a very difficult personality. How did that process work with her?

JB: She was incredibly easy to deal with, making that record. She had spent long days in the studio on her first record, and she didn't want to do that again. She would come in and work really hard for the three to four hours she was there, and then she'd fuck off and I'd do some work and try some ideas on the songs. She was very articulate emotionally, and it was my first chance to have the things I felt I needed. It kind of felt like it was the first time I was really handed the keys, and she respected where I was going, so I knew I had freedom to experiment.

O: How do you feel about the fact that the kind of "pop-rock" you work on now exists as a genre in and of itself, where singer-songwriters are often treated as small-scale genre artists?

JB: Well, I think most of the people who are called songwriters aren't necessarily very good at it, and it gives the singer-songwriter a bad name. Every person with an acoustic guitar who's sensitive and here to tell the world what a poet they are... There are a lot of people who are pretty bad at it. There are just as many bad rock bands as there are bad pop performers. It's funny that the people I work with often get lumped in with what's referred to as "pop songs." What people mean by that is actually well-written, melodic songs that have some emotional context. Pop is no longer the word for it, because it's not a popular form of music. Pop music right now is Christina Aguilera and whatever melodic faux-punk band that's super over-produced and playing on KROQ and has a singalong chorus. Aimee Mann only became pop music for a moment in people's minds thanks to Paul Anderson. She's not been able to get arrested since the first 'Til Tuesday single, but since her first solo record, she's at least developed a strong cult following with people who understand that she's literate, articulate, funny, emotional, and all of those things. I love the idea of what's called the "pop song." I just wish there was a better term for it, because it's a misnomer. But this notion of a three-minute art form where you have to condense a thought... If you're actually concerned with it being emotional or having a new idea or being a different angle on an old subject, to really make that happen is rare and beautiful. And the people who can do it on a regular basis are very rare and beautiful.

O: How do you manage to keep some sort of faith in the form, and also try to push it forward so that it's more than a museum piece?

JB: I'd like to think there's something in it that is new each time, but people might not be quick to recognize it. What makes Aimee's music specifically different from other people's is that she has a very clear manifesto of what she's trying to achieve, and lyrically, she's on her game in a way that other people aren't. For every Radiohead, there's 10,000 supposedly modern rock bands who aren't a tenth that creative, or a tenth that emotional. For every Elliott Smith, there are 10,000 people who think they're sensitive poets. For every 10,000 people who have a drum machine and run things through a filter box, there's an Aphex Twin. Most people who think they're being modern aren't. This is a big beef of mine. To me, there's a huge difference between modern and being current. Huge. When something's current, it's already not modern. There was tons of intentional electronic-music influence on Fiona's last record in the way we approached drums: the repetition, how things are filtered, how things move from section to section. There's electronic music in it, but it's a completely organic record. But to come back to this pop-song thing: All the people I respect are trying to make three-minute condensed little works that have an idea that will bring you some sort of emotion, or give you some piece of information that might be useful to you. That doesn't mean it has to be heavy-handed. It could be the most lightweight piece of fluff that makes you happy for three minutes, and its usefulness is that you can put it on and it makes you tap your feet and forget your troubles. I love that. I also love when someone writes a lyric that's so insightful that you'll be quoting it for the rest of your life, and it will actually influence your relationships in the future. The people I like are trying to do that. They're not anachronistically trying to make the perfect old-fashioned pop song. In my own writing, on the surface it can seem like this old form of pop music, but I think if people dig in, they realize, "Wow! This never would have been the sort of lyrics that would have been on those sorts of songs in the first place." With most of the people I like, there is that sense of juxtaposition in their work. And there are tons of interesting combinations of influences. I love the form of the pop song, which I know is maligned and looked at as anachronistic, but the people I look to are constantly trying to find newness in it, to recognize what's slightly different about this one from another one. And that's where the beauty is, in recognizing that. I don't know. It's a funny subject, but at the end of the day, there are only so many people who I think are really good at it—very, very, very few.

Spinner mit Ukulele

Spinner mit Ukulele
Von Christoph Dallach

Den Plattenfirmen ist er viel zu eigenwillig, doch der romantische Dandy Jon Brion hat sein Plätzchen dennoch gefunden - als heißer Insider-Tipp in der Clubszene von Los Angeles und als Soundtrack-Komponist für Hollywood.

Wer den Musikclub Largo in Los Angeles sucht, sollte zum Beginn jedes Wochenendes nach einer Menschenschlange südlich vom Sunset Strip Ausschau halten. Dort tritt freitagabends ein gewisser Jon Brion auf. Vor gewöhnlich ausverkauftem Haus spielt der 39-jährige Dandy auf bevorzugt exotischen Instrumenten eigene Kompositionen, die an die ausgefalleneren Momente der Beatles und Beach Boys erinnern, und irrwitzige Coverversionen, zum Beispiel AC/DCs "You Shook Me All Night Long" mit Ukulele-Begleitung.

Weil Brion in Zeiten der totalen Digitalisierung Klang und Wärme traditioneller Instrumente und Melodien zelebriert, ist er längst über Los Angeles hinaus zum Dauergeheimtipp avanciert: Als Produzent und Session-Musiker war er an den großen Erfolgen von Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple und den Eels beteiligt. Auch Macy Gray, Beck, Peter Gabriel und David Byrne haben ihn schon gebucht. Sein wunderschönes Solo-Album "Meaningless" war einer großen Plattenfirma zu eigensinnig und ist deshalb nur online (www.jonbrion.com) erhältlich.

Dafür heuert ihn immer wieder der Hollywood-Regisseur Paul Thomas Andersson ("Magnolia") als Soundtrack-Komponisten an. Auch dessen neues Werk "Punch-Drunk Love" hat Brion mit sehr schönen Klängen veredelt. Wem das gefällt, sollte sich mal an einem Freitagabend frühzeitig in die Warteschlange vor dem Largo einreihen.

Human Chorus

Links to parts one and two of a performance and interview.

Part One

Part Two

Jon Brion

Jon Brion
ALAN J. DUIGNAN / Los Angeles Times

When seeing Jon Brion for the first time, inevitably two questions come to mind. How is this possible? And, most puzzling, how is a show like this not blowing people's minds in much larger venues across the country?

The first question is probably the easiest to answer. The average song performed by Jon Brion usually begins with the multi-instrumentalist pacing the stage, eyeing his piano, drum kit and many guitars the way some people eye a dessert cart. Brion then settles on whatever instrument moves him most and starts recording himself playing a few measures before moving onto another instrument, and then another, until finally he's settled on one--often a Frankenstein-looking guitar--and begins singing and playing over himself while you sit and swear there should be an entire band behind him.

The show itself consists mostly of audience requests in a sort of twisted musical version of "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" Anything in pop music history is fair game; past covers have included a sweetly warped version of Prince's "Purple Rain" performed in the style of Les Paul and a straight-ahead cover of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" that could have powered all of Fairfax. Part of the game is you don't quite know what to expect from night to night, and that's what's made this one-man band one of the hottest tickets in Los Angeles on Friday night.

Don't worry about Brion not yet achieving an appropriate level of fame and fortune for these musical acrobatics. Gradually, he's started to make a name for himself as a producer, collaborating with everyone from the Crystal Method to Aimee Mann. But really it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world catches on, so if you want to catch this act be sure to call for a reservation early (Monday's probably a good bet). Secrets only stay safe for so long.

Who is Jon Brion? (And is There Anything He Can't Do?)

Who is Jon Brion? (and is there anything he can't do?)
By Greg Kot
Tribune rock critic
Published February 12, 2003

LOS ANGELES -- Just who is Jon Brion and why have people been lining up outside a West Hollywood club each of the last 300 weekends to see him indulge his every musical whim on a stage packed with exotic instruments?

Brion is one of the most in-demand, behind-the-scenes musical talents in Los Angeles. He's not People-magazine famous despite his production work with more renowned artists such as Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright and Macy Gray, and his soundtracks for the movies of Paul Thomas Anderson ("Hard Eight," "Magnolia," "Punch-Drunk Love"). But in a city in which celebrity and profit often overshadow talent and vision, Brion is a self-contained success story, a quintuple-threat songwriter, arranger, producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer.

Celebrated jazz pianist Brad Mehldau calls Brion his favorite pianist. Master session drummer Jim Keltner says he can't get enough of Brion's drumming. Mann says, "Jon's secret is out. . . . Everyone knows how good he is." He not only produces albums for the likes of Robyn Hitchcock and Grant Lee Buffalo, he plays virtually all the instruments on them too. When Tom Petty needed someone to do string arrangements on his latest album, "The Last DJ," and conduct an orchestra at a handful of concerts, he sought out Brion.

"The Paul Thomas Anderson movies got me to check him out, because those are my favorite contemporary movie scores," Petty says. "We met a few years ago, and I thought he'd be good for achieving the kind of cinematic feel I wanted for this record, and he was."

But Brion's true calling is as a singer, writer and arranger of pungent pop songs, the kind of sophisticated three-minute emotional journeys that take their cues from Ray Davies' "Waterloo Sunset," Squeeze's "Tempted" or David Bowie's "Heroes," all of which the singer performs in stunning interpretations at his Largo residency.

He has produced one self-released album after a stint with the critically acclaimed cult group the Grays, and he's so busy with his production work that he doesn't have time to play out-of-town concerts, much less tour. Which is why his weekly gigs at Largo, a 120-capacity club on Fairfax Avenue just a few blocks south of the Sunset Strip, have become a must-see for out-of-town fans and touring musicians alike.

Every Friday night for the last six years, Brion has been turning the tiny stage of the nightclub into his private playground stocked with stringed instruments, thrift-shop keyboards, a drum kit, children's music boxes, even a turntable on which he'll play the odd mood-setting Vincent Price album. One could imagine everyone from Prince to Harpo Marx being right at home here.

Prince and Harpo haven't come to Largo to hang out with Brion, but friends such as Mann, Apple, Hitchcock, Neil Finn, Ben Folds and the members of Paul McCartney's touring band have. "We're all song sluts here," Brion says. "That's what brings people to Largo."

Layered compositions

The club is home to his pop-song chemistry experiments, where he builds elaborately layered compositions from the ground up: He'll start with a groove on drums, then shift to keyboards, then bass and guitar, all the while taping and looping each segment until a complete song appears before the audience's eyes and ears. He's audacious, turning even dreck like Captain and Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" into a lush, layered Les Paul-like guitar instrumental.

"Word got around, and it went from being a fun, casual thing to becoming an event," says Largo owner Mark Flanagan, a burly Belfast native sipping coffee near the bar as his club begins to fill up for a Brion performance. "First people started turning up to see who would get up on stage with Jon, but after awhile it turned out that they didn't care who would or wouldn't get up; they were just into him. Instead of getting tired, the weird thing is that it [Brion's residency] just keeps building, and I'm wondering, how long can this go on?"

Upstairs in a dressing room lit up with year-round Christmas lights, Brion is wearing a polka-dot tie and warming up his fingers with a mandolin on a beat-up brown leather couch. His ocean-blue eyes, baby face and jet-black tousle of hair make him appear a decade younger than his 39 years.

"Most of my famous friends are pretty jealous that I get to play 50 gigs a year and don't have to tour," he says. "And the rest of the time I can produce records, play on other people's songs, write my own songs, do collaborative projects and live. I actually think it's miraculous."

But with opportunity comes responsibility. "There are a lot of audience members who've literally seen more than 100 shows," he says. "To me, that's cool because I can't repeat myself. They have to have a few moments every night where I completely jump off a cliff and find something new, even if it's hideous."

One of those moments occurs later that night. He closes his set with an original piano ballad so fresh he hasn't settled on a title for it yet, but it's jaw-dropping in its carefully calibrated intensity. It chronicles a painful breakup through a one-way conversation with God. "You made the world, you made the sun, you made the girl," Brion sings. "Could you admit that just this once you made a mistake?"

Normally when Brion plays the song, he builds up a huge layer of insulation by looping numerous instruments to swirl around him while he rips open a vein. But on this night, he does it alone at the piano. "That was a first," he says backstage, still flush from the performance. "I'm a year out of this relationship and now a fairly happy guy again. But I wasn't for a good six months. So I play the song now and look at the words, and it's kind of painful: I feel really bad for the guy who wrote that song. I thought, `God, I've come a long way.' People have been watching me perform for the past year, and now I wonder what the hell have they been seeing? I can only imagine."

Critical of own work

Another intense relationship with a long-ago girlfriend, Mann, was in part forged around their "militant" ideas of what constituted a good song. The pair met in Boston during the '80s, became lovers, broke up and then came to Los Angeles separately in the early '90s looking for a fresh start. "We both became, in truth, harsh critics of our own work and others' work, but we really heightened and informed each other's sense of why we liked songs," he says.

He ended up producing and playing on Mann's acclaimed solo albums "Whatever" (1993) and "I'm With Stupid" (1995), as well as parts of "Bachelor No. 2" (2000). These albums set in motion a remarkable transformation, in which Mann went from being the spike-haired pop chanteuse in 'Til Tuesday to the revered songwriter she is today.

Brion's phone started ringing soon after with pitches from artists and managers seeking his services. The Mann albums stood out amid a glut of digitally overproduced California pop albums, Brion framing her songs in eerie, evocative soundscapes, thanks in part to an armada of supposedly outdated instruments he started stockpiling at garage sales and flea markets more than a decade ago: Optigans, Marxophones, Chamberlains.

"Everybody was selling everything they owned because they all bought samplers and sequencers," he says. "I'd buy their old Wurlitzers for $50, knowing that it not only has the complete range of expression a sampler has, but infinitely more because it's a real mechanical instrument so you can play with the mechanisms and alter all the tones as much and as often as you like. People like me, Mitchell Froom and Tom Waits who were using this stuff on our records got laughed at a lot. But about five years ago, enough of these records became well enough known that suddenly vintage keyboards were the thing. I couldn't afford to buy my vintage keyboards now."

As a result, Brion has his fingerprints all over a bunch of albums that don't leave any fingerprints -- that is, it's almost impossible to detect the source for many of the odd but alluring sounds he has conjured. "Sometimes I keep broken stuff just because it makes this one great weird sound," he says. "And I'm not going to get rid of it till I can find a place where that one weird sound is going to have a happy home."

The key is finding the right home. Otherwise Brion would just be the "weird-instruments guy," a sound-effects man. His art is in bringing out the atmosphere and intent of the song rather than merely packing it with sonic details. "Most of the stuff I do is a coloring job, and it's easy," he says. "The hard part is finding human beings who know what they want to convey in a song. If you're not into the songs as a producer, it isn't worth doing the job. Unfortunately, there aren't that many people who have a real individualistic stance."

Self-taught musician

Brion's sense of individualism was forged at an early age. His first session gig was as a 17-year-old high school dropout in New Haven, Conn. By then he'd taught himself to play several instruments and studied the rudiments of orchestration. "I was 7 or 8 years when the thought occurred to me: `What if I couldn't spend my life making music?'" Brion says. "And I remember rationally thinking, with no drama whatever, that I'd just have to commit suicide if it didn't happen. I've never not known what I was going to do from that moment on."

Brion has become part of a Los Angeles-based gaggle of artists -- Mann; her husband, Michael Penn; Apple and her boyfriend, Anderson; Grant Lee Buffalo; Jakob Dylan of the Wallflowers; Mitchell Froom; Beck -- who are doing their part to restore the sagging currency of the song in the pop-culture lexicon.

"Why do I love songs? It's three minutes of condensed storytelling, of trying to collect your thoughts lyrically, musically and emotionally, and when it works there's nothing on earth like it," Brion says. "Think about it: Airwaves of sound move the little hairs and bones in your body, enter your brain and make your neurons fire off skyrockets. No matter how much you look at the math of it, it is beautiful, it is mystical beyond words. I only have to think about a song like `Waterloo Sunset,' and my physiology changes. What's not to love about that?"

On the Beatles, other peeves

Brion on why he hates the Beatles: "The Beatles and Bob Dylan, two of my idols, severely screwed up music for our generation. They set the precedent that we are cool only if we write our own songs. In the past, we didn't expect Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole to write songs. We expected emotional experience from them, and they delivered it. They delivered songs written by guys who sat in rooms drinking coffee. Now because of the precedent set by Dylan and the Beatles, people who write songs feel the need to perform them. Now we have tons of bands with great singers doing horrible material, and there's no need. There are enough humans in the world who could probably provide them with the fodder for any emotional experience, but it's not going to happen. So, the Beatles and Dylan, my idols, I hate their guts."

Brion on why Led Zeppelin's deficient: "I don't listen to Led Zeppelin for songs. I listen to them for performance and arrangement, the authority of the drum sounds, the crazy room sounds, and the colors in the guitar, the groove. I listen to them for the same reason I listen to James Brown: The groove is phenomenal. I ask no more of the music than to groove hard as it does and then, on top of it, they give me this nice color change. Pretty cool. But any Led Zeppelin fan who has heard me say, `I don't think they have songs,' will cry, `They have 10 albums of them! What kind of freak are you?' And I'll answer, `They have 10 albums of great music, not great songs.'"

Brion on his favorite productions: "Fiona Apple's last record [`When the Pawn ...' in 1999], no question. I felt like I'd finally learned how to make records sound like I wanted them to sound, both aggressive and soft and to have full bandwidth and not lack character, to have arrangement and also to have space. . . . The other record I have real emotional affinity for is Aimee Mann's first record [`Whatever' in 1993], though it has many faults, most of which are my inexperience. The one thing that is right about that record is that the sense of song is absolutely there. . . . Before then, people weren't seeing the fearsome qualities in Aimee's music, so I was on a mission, and I believe if someone finds that record 60 years from now, they'll hear some really good songs."