A Reluctant Musical Genius

filmstew, december 30th, 2004

A Reluctant Musical Genius
Whether it’s making up songs on the spot Friday nights at Hollywood nightclub Largo or laboring for months on movie soundtracks, Jon Brion is ultimately just a hard-working ideas man.
Thursday, December 30, 2004
By Todd Gilchrist

There are few composers working today who have left as indelible a mark on modern cinema as Jon Brion. Along with anchoring Friday nights at the Los Angeles club Largo for longer than anyone can remember, the 34-year-old Connecticut native has also been responsible for some of the movies’ oddest and most unique odysseys, including Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I Heart Huckabees. Not that you would be able to immediately tell by listening to these respective scores; Brion’s oeuvre is defined by a distinctive lack of conceptual continuity beyond its consistent excellence. And as the composer recently told FilmStew, that’s just the way he likes it. “I have nothing,” Brion says of his approach to composing. “I have my gut, and I have my relationship with the given director, and that’s it.” Brion, also a producer of such venerated performers as Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright and Aimee Man, began his film career in 1996 thanks to a chance encounter with then-unproven director Paul Thomas Anderson. The result: a jazz-influenced score for Hard Eight.

While Brion acknowledges that he’s enjoyed innumerous opportunities working with some of the best people in show business, this particular strand of his music career came almost in spite of his own efforts. “I guess it’s pretty important to note that I’ve spent my entire career trying to avoid doing movies,” he explains, with now five significant credits attached to his composing resume. “That’s my first advice to anybody getting into the motion picture business: avoid doing them at all costs.” “And then, when ones that are sort of so good that you can’t refuse them come up, do those,” he continues. “I mean, that’s pretty much all I’ve done. I’ve never actively sought movie work.” However, Brion’s general resistance to working in the motion picture business has been consistently couched over the years by the chance to work with folks who are impossible to say no to. “When I get a phone call or somebody I know goes, ‘I’ve got a movie you might be interested in,’ I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do any movies. I want to make records. Leave me alone!’” he says with a chuckle. “[They reply,] ‘Oh, it’s these guys Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman,’ and I’m just like Goddammit! It’s like Al Pacino- they keep pulling me back.”

“I’m fortunate enough that whatever it is I’ve done for some other movie, someone sees it and calls up and wants to do something,” he says modestly. “If I know something they’ve done and actually had an emotional response to it - for instance, with Michel Gondry, when he called I hadn’t seen the first movie that he had done with Charlie, but I was a fanatical fan of his video work, and actually had collections of his videos on VHS tapes from years before.” “An old girlfriend was in a video of his and that’s how he came to my attention almost ten years ago,” he remembers. “She said, ‘Oh my God. You’ve got to see this guy’s reel!’ It used to be this thing we had around the house and just watch for the pure joy of it, so he wasn’t yet sort of a known name.” Brion’s partnership with Kaufman gave birth to the singular audiovisual experience Eternal Sunshine, which branded romance in melancholy and established both the filmmaker and composer’s names to folks who before might only have known each of them in passing. Like most composers, Brion typically joins a production once most of the shooting is already completed. But he has also enjoyed some very unique and fruitful collaborations during and even prior to the beginning of production. “Most people remember they have to hire a composer once they have started editing the film,” Brion maintains. “It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, we should have some music on this,’ which I think is a pity, because if you really want it to be integrated with the film, you make your decisions earlier one.”

“A lot of the great stuff with Spielberg and John Williams [whom the director recently characterized at the Kennedy Center Awards as the most fortunate element of his movie career], I think there was a little more contact early in the process,” Brion observes. “I mean, with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you had to; they had to know what their little melodic figure was going to be that’s used in communications, and because of it there’s a real beauty to how the music works in that film.” This is in fact the way Brion worked with Paul Thomas Anderson on Punch-Drunk Love. At the same time, he confesses that even the most elaborate collaborations sometimes generate ideas that seem anathema to his own creative process. “ What always happens is you have the themes for the character and then the director goes, ‘Yeah, I don’t like that piece of music for that moment; can we take this piece and put it over there?’” he explains. “Suddenly it’s like, ‘Well, that’s the theme for the opposite character.’ It just becomes, ‘There’s no poetic interaction here,’ and I give up on it.” Despite these occasional obstacles, Brion has always flourished by working with filmmakers who fly in the face of convention to create something new. “The people I’m attracted to are trying to break up cinematic clichés in general, so why should we be beholden to the leitmotif idea in general?” he suggests. While Brion’s reputation as a musical mad-hatter opens him up to some tough demands from collaborators, he loves the idea of delivering music that others might look at as not always appropriate for the on-screen moments being accompanied. It’s the kind of philosophy that endears him to fellow iconoclasts such as Anderson. “Paul’s working process for every movie changes,” Brion reveals. “He does not have a hard and fast way that he does this. Even though he has a crew of people he trusts and generally works with, he is changing the very concept of how he approaches making movies every time, and there’s a lot of that in how I’ve made records.” Nevertheless, Brion admits that each and every project he’s worked on has proved significantly taxing, no matter how familiar he was with the director or his other collaborators. “Every one is a challenge,” he confesses. “Many of the musical decisions that get made in the movies aren’t even ones I necessarily agreed with. I tried to make it work as well as I could, and then it was mixed the way they wanted it mixed.”

“I consider the things I don’t like acceptable losses,” adds Brion. “But because I allow myself to be collaborative with directors, I’ve finally realized that because I can offer up options on the spot, they pretty much do with me what they do with actors and editors.”
Even though this doesn’t necessarily always create better options, it can provide some mightily useful creative context. “Fifty takes in, it’s like, ‘You know, that second take you did was pretty great,’” he says with a laugh. “It’s always exhausting.” “I haven’t done a movie where I wasn’t absolutely just a quivering mass of flesh that couldn’t remember its own name at the end,” he continues. “If I was a quivering mass of flesh on the ground for a picture that’s just an average picture, I’d kill myself. That would be terrible. It would be an awful life.” Having helped shape the sound of many progressive alternative musicians during the 1990’s, Brion can now look back on undeniably the signature year of his evolving sideline career as a movie soundtrack auteur. Although he does not yet know exactly how he will follow I Heart Huckabees and Eternal Sunshine, he looks forward to the relative simplicity of the cinema art form.

Friday Night Music Club

LA alternative press, december 10th, 2004

Friday Night Music Club
Grammy nominee Jon Brion indulges in the eternal experimentation of the musical mind.
BY Antero Garcia

You’ve got to be careful when you talk music with Jon Brion; the guy is a pop encyclopedia. Ask a simple question on changes in pop music, you’ll get a 10-minute history of the word "pop," starting with Gershwin and Porter in the ‘20s, flying past the Beatles, and not stopping for a breath of air until the White Stripes, grunge, and "Hey Ya." It’s this kind of unrelenting enthusiasm for pop – the same feeling evoked as his fingers itch toward various instruments every Friday night – that makes Brion one of the most compelling musicians to not merely hear, but to experience in Los Angeles.

"I love the fact that I don’t know what I will do next week and won’t know when I walk onstage," Brion explains. "It will just happen and I’ll have fun and there will be enough good moments in the evening that people leave feeling like they got something. The fact that that is a complete circuit is bewilderingly beautiful to me."

Maybe that’s what’s so alluring about Brion’s Largo residency year after year: his ability to surprise not only the audience but also himself every week. For the past eight years, Brion has held a Friday-night residency at the Fairfax District venue. The weekly show is less of a concert than a madman on display. Brion shuffles restlessly among his myriad of instruments, effects pedals, and microphones, muttering to himself, hoping to find an instrument that will call to him. He frequently relies on audience requests to propel the set. Compelled and drawn toward songs and motifs, Brion leaves the set, like the direction of his work, entirely up to mood and innate feeling.

His non-Largo work includes film scoring, record producing, and a library of solo material that runs the gamut of the pop canon. Most recently, Brion penned the scores for both "I Heart Huckabees" and Michelle Gondry’s feature "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," which, just last week, earned Brion a nomination in the category of Best Score Soundtrack Album For A Motion Picture. Brion’s penchant to encompass a film’s main theme in two- to three-minute pop songs is epitomized in the Huckabee’s tune "Knock Yourself Out." Brion also worked with P. T. Anderson on "Magnolia."

Brion appreciates the versatile and collaborative opportunities these directors offer. "When they see that I can execute any left turn they want at any moment, they then want to exercise a certain amount of choices," Brion explains about the painstaking process of creating an enriching film score. "That can be time- consuming and frustrating, but I’ve got to believe that if this person made some big piece of creative work that interested me, they know something that I don’t."

Like his wildly collaborative experiences with film, Brion’s constantly confronted with requests for either playing on a peer’s album or producing someone’s record (past artists include Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, and Macy Gray).

"I’m like a therapist saying, ‘Did you know every time this subject comes up, you say this,’" Brion says wryly. "That’s what a producer is doing: ‘It’s funny, you keep telling me how aggressive you want your music to come off as and yet every time it has an aggressive element you take it out. What’s that about?’ That’s the real value of the producer. None of us can really see what we look like on the outside."

Perhaps it’s Brion’s inability to see his own music from the outside that finds such a slight discography at present. Aside from numerous appearances as a guest musician, Brion’s own musical output is basically film scores and a stellar collection of pop songs found on "Meaningless."

Brion’s own melodies are of the stuck-in-your-head-for-eons variety and the production playful, upbeat, sunny. On the other hand, the lyrics are a dark stew of rejection, loneliness, and misery.

The blending of dismal lyrics with baroque, ‘60s-influenced pop is a sublime combination, a blend as deliberate as it is off-kilter.

His Largo shows are intended as experimental juxtapositions and combinations. To wit: "Moon River" as a Nirvana homage, Outkast’s "Roses" as a soul song, or Radiohead’s "Creep" reborn as a ragtime ditty sung a la Tom Waits.

Of the many releases Brion’s helped produce recently, Elliott Smith’s posthumous "From A Basement on a Hill "has garnered some of the most attention. A close friend of Smith’s, Brion sounds detached as he speaks of Smith’s final album.

"A lot of my favorite things on that record were recorded years ago, finished years ago. I think the classic, ‘recently deceased artist’ myth is going to take over. People who are misty-eyed are going to go, ‘This is what he was doing before he departed us,’ but a lot of those songs have been around for years."

Then there’s the eagerly anticipated third work from Fiona Apple, largely produced by Brion as well. Though in the can for months, the record is currently shelved by Sony Records.

Though the album has yet to see a release date, already two of its songs are being shared all over the world via the Internet.

"Eventually all that stuff is going to leak out," Brion says. "I feel bad for Fiona. You have to remember that a few years ago she was all but ready to quit the business, and if they keep making decisions like this, who would blame her?"

The business side of music is a beast that constantly burdens an artist like Brion. Ultimately, his chance to unwind from such mishaps and frustrations is readily available to him every Friday night.

"I’m just grateful to do it," Brion says of his weekly gig. "It’s my therapy and my meditation. No matter what I’m doing in the week for other people this is my time to do something. The fact that people continue to show up and are interested is so heartening."

Producer's Corner

performing songwriter, december 2004

Producer's Corner
By Clay Steakley

JON BRION is a quadruple threat, to say the least. Noted as a producer, solo artist, multi-instrumentalist and soundtrack composer, Brion carved a career for himself by refusing to compromise or to bow to anyone's perception of what makes a successful career in the music industry.

From the artists he's produced, be they Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright or Fiona Apple, to his engaging film scores, Brion consistently chooses the spark of intelligence, sonic quality and satisfying melody over easy jabs at pop hits or notoriety. The result is a catalog to envy.

As a composer, he has scored Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Punch-Drunk Love and Magnolia, the last garnering him a Grammy nomination. Most recently, he has composed the soundtrack for David O. Russell's quirky I Heart Huckabees.

In 1994, Brion and former Jellyfish guitarist Jason Falkner formed the Grays and released one widely praised album, Ro Sham Bo. From there, Brion went on to play with and produce a stellar list of artists including Sam Phillips, Badly Drawn Boy, Taj Mahal, Eels, and Robyn Hitchcock.

His contributions to albums like Aimee Mann's Bachelor No. 2 and his production of her “That's Just What You Are,” Fiona Apple's debut Tidal, and Rufus Wainwright's eponymous 1998 album illustrate the broad reach of his taste and contributions as both session musician and producer. In addition, the mixed bag of unusual instruments he provides works both to loosen up artists' creativity and to add new and unexpected timbres to the records. A quick survey of his instrument credits includes optigan, marxophone, mellotron, celeste, and even a little ukelele on Grant Lee Phillips' stunning Virginia Creeper. And that's just the beginning of the closet of oddities Brion has at his disposal.

The year 2001 marked a new stage in Brion's already eclectic career when he released his first solo outing, Meaningless. The critically adored album featured smart and expansive pop that, at times, surpassed the work of the artists he'd produced.

He's also eight years into a wildly popular weekly residency at the Los Angeles haunt Largo, where he delivers a mixed-bag show of improvisation, bizarre requests and reworkings of tunes ranging from Neil Young to Nirvana, plus occasional celebrity guest appearances from folks like Mitchell Froom and Robyn Hitchcock.

In short, one never knows what to expect from Brion. He's always working toward a broader understanding of music and how it's made. He consistently works with artists of the highest caliber and, as a result, produces music of the highest order.

Your most recent film project was I Heart Huckabees. Tell me how that score came together.

It was really a fairly organic thing. I started off writing some instrumental music and, at some point, David Russell, the director, started saying, “No, I want something with more feeling.”

I started talking with him about what that represented to him, and we got into a conversation of my hatred of emotional wallpaper soundtrack music and of gratuitous song placement in films. And about how I wished soundtrack music felt more songlike, rather than having the disparity of this week's rock band crowbarred into the film and some absolutely generic sound behind other scenes. I said I'd really been wanting to do something that felt more like songs, and that I wanted to hear more melody in soundtrack music. My favorite stuff had that — be it The Third Man or something like that where the melody is so strong that you're psyched to hear it if it comes back multiple times.

So somehow while we were sitting there watching the movie, I said, “Just give me a moment to get back in songwriter-head and out of soundtrack guy-head,” and I was just plunking melodies of things I'd written to remind myself of what the difference is to me. In the process of doing it, there was the classic, “What's that?!” I said, “Oh, it's this old thing of mine that was never released.” We put it in and suddenly the scene completely came alive. Then I noticed that the melodies I'd been playing had lyrics that directly related to the scenes.

So I just started doing this weird experiment where I would pick unreleased songs of mine but I wouldn't tell him what the lyrics were. Inevitably, he would pick the one that had the lyrics appropriate for the scene, which told me that he and I had the same emotional reference points with music. If I was writing to a particular lyric, it had a very particular tonality, and it would match up with the scene. It was really something special.

How are the dynamics different between producing a soundtrack you've written in which you're the primary artist and producing a pop artist in the studio?

Oddly enough, there is another artist and that is the director; you're not actually getting to stand in front of an orchestra doing exactly what you want to do. They're the pieces that he deemed right for the movie with the changes that make him comfortable. The very melody itself that made you write the song may be a thing that's like, “Yeah, make that clarinet thing go away.” And this is happening on the floor while you're standing in front of the orchestra. And it's like, “It's all nice, but that oboe thing isn't very good.” And you're like, “OK, once again, that's the melody.”

Or they say, “That other thing, I like that.” And that's the harmony — which is now the melody — which is OK by itself, but then it goes back into the melody at the end of it and it's incredibly awkward, you know? It's changing the architecture and shape of it, and suddenly it no longer does what it was supposed to do emotionally. It's actually kind of confusing and distracting. But, dammit, it's their movie.

Does it make the decision-making easier, having a little dictator over in the corner?

People think that by producing a record you're expressing your tastes. You're not. You're part of a whole bunch of people. If it's just you and one other artist, you're still deferring to them.

In my case, I'm OK with it because it's the director's movie. If the director wants the music twice as loud or twice as soft as I think is right, that's their prerogative.

With the kinds of directors I'm attracted to, they really are looking into everything and that's why their movies are good — it's not a committee decision. That's why I think committee decision-making for artistic things is almost unilaterally suck-ass.

The artists you've worked with have very distinctive creative personalities. What draws them to work with you?

I think, if there's a personality trait, it's that they make their decisions qualitatively, which is what I do. That may seem like a real simple statement but quite honestly, most people don't do that. Most people, even on creative projects, drop the ball somewhere along the line and start doing things just because they think it's what they should do or they're trying to make it sell more or whatever. [The people I work with] don't buy into any of that stuff.

Regarding qualitative decision making — what do you look for in an artist to produce?

I guess the honest answer is, not much. I just listen to the stuff and I either like it or I don't. I don't work with bands, so I don't have to do “preproduction.” Preproduction is whatever conversations we have. It's whatever records we mention to each other. Somebody says, “You know what I hate? I hate all these records that are like this.” And I say, “Oh, God, we should make sure we avoid that. Yeah. Let's make a list of the things those records do and were not gonna do any of that.” That's more likely to happen.

Do you do demos, then?

I absolutely think that the concept of demos should not exist. I think anytime somebody's recording they should treat it as a recording. They shouldn't waste their first-take energy on making something they are not going to have the guts to release for technical reasons. Don't do it. At most, sing into a Dictaphone or a boombox. But demos, no.

Is that concept difficult to get across to songwriters you work with?

If songwriting for them means making tracks or whatever, those aren't necessarily the people I'd want to work with. When I hear, “This song is about this guitar sound coming in at this point and playing this lick in this way,” to me, that's not a song. It's arranging. It's fine if people are good arrangers, but I hear so many people who put these things together and refer to them as songs, but they don't have much of a melody and they don't have a lyrical perspective. Right now they're chord changes with arrangement things on them. Nothing could bore me more.

Whereas any of the people I work with, generally if they sat down and played the song on the instrument on which they wrote it, it is self-contained. Now, how do we want to color that? Most of the records I've done are absolutely and entirely that. And even if they seem really diverse from song to song, if you actually pay attention, it's the songwriter and instrument they wrote it on. Then there's the rhythm section, then there are little doohickeys squirreling around in the background, gathering nuts on the lawn in your backyard. And then, if the voice stops, something else can come in and make a musical statement almost just to carry you until the voice comes back on again.

So what quality is it that most attracts you to an artist?

My attraction is to somebody who is a songwriter and who has something going on emotionally and intellectually. It's got to be both things. People always talk about one thing at the expense of the other, which is, in truth, fairly tiring. Because the stuff that really breaks your heart is the stuff that gets into your head and hits your consciousness on many levels.

I've heard so many songs by people who have had the worst things happen to them in their lives and they're really very sincere. But it doesn't necessarily make for emotional experience if they don't know what constitutes cliche. Having the genuine experience happen to you is not even enough to constitute a great song. For me to be affected, I want to feel like the songwriter is looking out on the same environment I am and has already sorted through a lot of the same things and is tired of a lot of the same things and is trying to point out something new. When I see that, that's paydirt for me.

So many songwriters I know have said that they write songs so they can find other people like them — so they can create a community.

That's great that they admit that out loud. I absolutely believe that. I've had various ways of saying that for years. The main analogy I always use is that there's a sea of people out there, and even if you stand up on your tiptoes, it just looks like the sea of tops of people's heads. But all of us feel absolutely drowned and smothered and lost and claustrophobic and want to find our community; by sort of making your little banner and holding it up high over people's heads, saying, “I am this. I like these kinds of things.” Then other people who are in the same position as you are, who are looking around, go, “Oh, over there.” And they wander over. Eventually, you can build an incredible community of people around you by really putting your best foot forward and being the individual you are and being loud about it. And by that I don't mean being inconsiderate and I don't mean self-promotional.

I think the people who work with me recognize that I've come to the same conclusions, and that I'm fighting hard to put things into the world that push forward a mindset that both heart and intelligence are good; that quality is good. And that you don't have to be either underground or overground — don't take part in either thing. In truth, don't go for the money and you might actually do OK.

I've known a lot of people who desperately run for the money and all of them make terrible choices. Some of them end up succeeding, which is enough to embolden the rest of them that they're on the right track. Really, the percentage of them who have succeeded isn't all that high anyway. So you get these people who are desperate and stressed out because they're not where they think they're supposed to be.

Tell me about your gig at Largo. It's become something of a phenomenon.

I sort of developed this way of performing because there were two things I was really tired of. One was the four-piece rock band playing their 45-minute rehearsed set, playing the album live, and acting as if they're new or dangerous.

I also hated the singer-songwriter thing, which is a guy on a stool going, “Here's a song about a real tough time I went through and, um, and, um, it's called, ‘My Pain’.” And then he proceeds to play this thing and it's seven minutes long and it meanders and you try and give it your attention. And it's like, “Wow. I just watched seven minutes of my life go by.”

So Largo was developed as a thing that didn't have a set list, and it was literally me trusting that if I just followed what my subconscious was telling me to do, that it would end up working. It took a few years to really learn how to do it and still have it paced to feel like a show, so that people knew I wasn't disappearing up my own backside in search of my subconscious.

How do you balance being a producer, composer and songwriter?

I feel this with my whole career, and it was a conscious decision many years ago: I don't want to do just one thing, I want to do many things.

I chose what was important to me. I've stuck to it and I'm doing fine. A lot of people have thought I'm anti-success over the years, which just cracks me up because I think of myself as wildly successful. I wake up when I want to, I work on the projects I want to, I work with people who absolutely inspire me. Everybody I work with has attributes I don't have, so I get to take part in collaborating with somebody who can bring other things to the table.

For me, that's my banner that I can hold up. And Largo is a screaming example. You don't have to perform the way other people tell you you're supposed to. I've never done a rehearsal and I've done all these gigs. And the nice thing is, there are people who have seen 200 shows. So obviously something is working for them and it's changing up enough that there's value to come back repeatedly.

It's got to be tough, juggling so many roles.

I think anybody who is constantly in charge or constantly subservient or constantly part of a group is going to be unhealthy. It's really fun to be on a session where I'm just one cog in a group of people, and there's an artist and a producer and many other people around who have much more say than I do. It's fun to be the artist and be the person presenting the choices. It's nice to be part of an ensemble playing music and be an almost invisible ingredient in a sound that's happening that requires you to merge with other people.

You can't be the guy who's driving all the time, you can't be riding shotgun all the time, you can't be in the backseat all the time. I think it's unhealthy. It's a wonderful learning experience to be in charge and it's a wonderful learning experience to have someone else be in charge.

When you start working on your own songs and you're the king, do your experiences with other artists leak over into your approaches?

Everything we do in every aspect of our lives leaks into every other aspect. I feel that pretty deeply. Hence, every session I've ever done feeds into my decision I make today, as well as every conversation I've had. This conversation is one more piece of information in my brain and my subconscious may be retrieving it without my knowing it. They get added cumulatively to other experiences. Not to sound too heady about it, but I do think any experience I've ever had from pumping some gas into my car to a conversation to any TV show I've watched — somehow it's all part of the pool of resources. Whatever the brain has stored is going to get accessed at some point.

That relates to what you were saying about the Largo shows, too . . . letting your subconscious work itself out fly by the seat of your pants and create.

That's what the surrealists were about. They were really taken with the notion of the subconscious and they were trying to develop systems that would not allow their conscious mind to be creating the work. And it's very interesting, the things they developed to do that. And a lot of that has been so inspirational to me, even though so much of what I do seems very normally compositional to people, the way at which I arrive at a lot of it is from very fierce improvisation and by pulling the rug out from under myself.

That creative time when you're playing an instrument and you've got a sound up and you don't know how to control it yet ... it's not those first moments when the sound is out of control, it's those first moments when your brain is trying to make sense of it. That's where the magic happens.
It's a lot like when you pick up an instrument you don't know how to play. These melodies start fumbling their way out that nobody who normally plays the instrument would probably come up with because they're “wrong” for whatever reason.

The fact that I collect weird instruments is not just because I love them and think they make beautiful sounds and because I get delight out of figuring out new combinations of pre-existing instruments. That's all true, but one of the things that drives me when I'm picking instruments out in a store or pawnshop is the knowledge that at some crucial moment when we're working together, I'm going to hand someone one of these things and their brain is going to go right back to that pure place we all have when we're trying to figure things out.

All of these things must enrich your work as a producer of other artists.

I guess that's my banner, which is still inherently like some children's book. It's that reassurance of, “Don't let people tell you how your life is supposed to be.” And don't think that if you go with your heart and your head and your own desires, that you're merely going to get shot down by this world. It's just not the case.

Then It Must Be True

then it must be true, november 2004

Then It Must Be True

It’s three in the afternoon and a slightly weary but alert Jon Brion has just woken up after recording sessions and gigs ran through late night into early morning. “I feel jetlagged without ever having traveled,” he says.

On the surface, Brion is pretty nondescript. He is steadily employed, socializes with friends, has likes and dislikes, and occasionally drinks more Guinness than coffee.

Upon closer inspection one finds his employment encompasses (in no particular order) singer, songwriter, composer, arranger, producer, multi-instrumentalist, one-man band and, some argue, comedian. Los Angeles' small and intensely intimate club Largo is where he’s earned his keep for the last eight years doing what he does best: improvising to his heart’s content. Those who frequent Brion’s Friday night shtick often file out of the club spilling hyperbolic torrents despite 2 a.m. drowsiness.

Tucked away just off Fairfax & Beverly Blvd, Largo is dimly lit, holding less than 200 people, and proprietor Mark Flanagan likes it that way. Patrons are to refrain from talking during performances, unless they’re ordering drinks. A number of notable acts, including Neil Finn, Elvis Costello, Grant-Lee Phillips and Aimee Mann have all at some point have transformed the tiny establishment into a volcano of sound. All the same, they are guests in the house that Brion built.

As a solo artist, he is no stranger to record company politics (read: trap doors). Brion was under the Lava/Atlantic umbrella for several years, during which time he completed two versions of his solo effort, Meaningless. As Lava/Atlantic felt neither version would appease listeners, Brion subsequently purchased the master recordings back from them and released it initially through Artist Direct in 2001. Brion's protege, Fiona Apple, is facing a similar fate against Sony Records with her newest project, Extraordinary Machine. Sony has shelved the album, claiming no mainstream-friendly single can be found. (If they look closely, they’ll find it’s on my middle finger.)

Under the guise of producer, Brion has been responsible for the sound of Rhett Miller’s The Instigator, Aimee Mann’s Whatever and I’m With Stupid, Rufus Wainwright’s self-titled debut, Evan Dando’s Baby I’m Bored, and Fiona Apple’s When The Pawn..., to name a few. To make a long story even longer, Brion has appeared as a guest musician for a heinously long list of artists, including Eels, Beth Orton, and Beck. Most recently, the Finn Brothers called upon Brion’s services. He appears on seven of the 12 tracks featured on Everyone Is Here, and is credited with co-production on two of those seven tracks, “Luckiest Man Alive,” and “Gentle Hum.”

On a poignant note, he also appears on the final and posthumous release of the late Elliott Smith, From a Basement on the Hill. When Smith made appearances at Largo, he would call on Brion for accompaniment. The club’s entrance now prominently displays a photograph of Smith’s beaming face, along with the caption, “Elliott watching Jon play.”

As a composer and arranger Brion has provided ambience for some of the more intriguing films of the last few years. Imagine how different (and probably lacking) Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would be were Brion not the man behind the curtain.

His latest release is the score to I Heart Huckabees - starring Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin - features a performance by The Section Quartet. Lead violinist Eric Gorfain reflected on his experience working with Brion, saying, “In a way, Jon plays the studio like an instrument, as all good producers do, so that everything from the choice and placement of microphones are just as important as the musicians’ performances.”

A recent conversation with Brion revealed a man successfully working around the ironies and sacrifices inherent in creating through an unabashedly scrutinized medium. He also says “life force” a lot.

It occurred to me that you’ve been receiving a lot more press this year from Huckabees.

Yeah. Hollywood’s much more efficient than, say, record companies. Record companies don’t really bother to tell somebody that something is out. And I think the people who work for the film company, and the publicists who are hired are immediately very efficient.

There was talk that you were added to Huckabees fairly late. It seemed as though another composer had been hired and then asked to leave the project prior to your arrival.

I don’t know if that’s the case or not. Often musicians come in very much at the tail end of the movie. I know that David O. Russell had wanted me and just didn’t think I was available, which was kind of true at that point. When people were trying to find me I was in the middle of doing Eternal Sunshine.

Was he difficult work with?

No! Actually, he was a dreamboat, despite what I’m supposed to think of him. But then, of course, what I’m supposed to think of him is based on, you know - (Laughs) - articles written about him, which I’ve learned from experience is not the way to get to know people, especially articles about the creative process. I don’t think people always understand other people’s processes. The always see them as strictly neuroses. He came in every day, he was articulate, and he’s really fun to be around. We’ve become good friends. I actually can’t say enough about him.

You appear to have a reputation for being picky about the people you work with. Do you consciously work with directors who don’t interfere with your “sound”?

That’s not really what it’s based on. I pick people based on the quality of choices they make. In other words, if I see the film and like it, they must have made a lot of choices that I think are pretty good. Any of the people I work with are pretty good at avoiding clichés of filmmaking, so that already tells me there’s somebody interested in finding new things. And if you’re making a film, which takes so long to make, there are so many chances to flatten something out and make it homogenous, and they didn’t at all those opportunities. Which means they’re probably a certain kind of person, qualitatively.

That’s where the choice comes in, and if I’m right I want to know what the quality of interference is gonna be. You know? I expect the interference; it’s the director’s medium. And, in fact, I consider myself quite subservient to the directors I work with. That’s all the more reason why I’m gonna be picky. It’s like, if you’re gonna be the person in charge who’s gonna make all the final creative decisions, then I’m putting myself in your hands. They’d better be capable. That’s what I’m picky about, and then once they’re in, as far as I’m concerned they can tell me everything to do.

When creating music for a film, does a character’s expression evoke a particular sound for you?

Sometimes, but I think more than that is the fact that I think it’s the director’s medium, so I’m looking at the film both stylistically and what it feels like emotionally. I’m trying to look at what the director is trying to communicate. Individual performances, if they’re really great and full of nuance, of course influence what you’re doing. But I think I tend to think of it more character-wise than each specific section or second of the movie.

I don’t think I’m somebody who, second by second, is scoring the movie as much as I am in a broader, emotional, stylistic way. You know, here’s the sort of state the director would like you to be in while you’re looking at this. A context for what you’re seeing, juxtaposition for what you’re seeing when juxtaposition is needed. And a particularly good performance would really help, obviously, because it makes things more emotional, so it gives you that much more of an angle on specific emotion, which is nice to have.

Thankfully, once again, if you choose your director qualitatively, all the performances are going to have life force, because they already recognize that to begin with. They already have that talent, so in general, most of the stuff I get to work on is pretty consistently good in terms of performance.

Some have said that your work as a producer is ‘too precious’ or ‘too scientific’. Would you agree with that assessment?

Of course I would!

What do you think they mean when they use those adjectives?

I don’t know. I consider that quite derivative. What do I think they mean? I think they mean I haven’t got a clue of what it means to be a human or to listen to music, in which case I think I can very scientifically say “fuck you” to that. Is it too precious? Well, Christ, add “pretentious” to that! Get right in on it. Nothing is going to rock everybody’s world.

As far as it being too precious or scientific, no way. I think a lot of people are completely thoughtless, making thoughtless shit and putting it out to the world. Just the use of the word “pretentious” alone…I bring that up for a reason. I sort of feel that people’s fear of being called pretentious keeps people from doing anything individualized. People are so afraid of being looked at that way.

I also have big pet peeves about this whole notion of a division between heart and head, and that one is better than the other. It’s like they’re useless without each other, and what’s even funnier is we don’t know that there’s any division. We don’t fucking know shit. We don’t know why we’re here or what we are. We haven’t a fucking clue. And certainly, trying to judge others on a scale of how connected they are to one or the other? Good luck.

There seem to be many complaints about the current climate of the American music industry with regard to artistic integrity and creative ownership. Is there anything rewarding about it these days?

Certainly not as much as previously. It is a bad moment, though not just because of the industry, but I think it’s a bad moment because I don’t think there are a lot of great artists right now at this particular juncture. I feel a lot of people who short circuit themselves, who are also worried about the climate business-wise, I think make dumb musical decisions. We get bad moments every few years where there’s not too much to admire, and I think we’re in one of those right now.

We’ll get on the other side of it. A few things will come out that will be great and actually have some life force and humans will be intrigued by them. And then all the other little human sheep will run over and start doing whatever the initial creative people were doing. And at least at first it’ll be some sort of scene and have some sort of interest for some period of time. That’ll die out and we’ll go into another period like this. That cycle just always continues.

It’s just not a good moment right now and business-wise we’re not in the marvelous new system yet. It’s kind of like the old system is obviously dying, the rats are jumping off the ship, and any time anybody talks about the future it’s this marvelous, artist-controlled utopia. Speaking from experience, myself with artists, the last thing you want is an artist-run record label because none of us will ever call the pressing plant in time to get anything made. In truth, there’s always some need for somebody to take care of that stuff.

And let’s say the record companies were all absolutely vaporized as of this afternoon. There would be abject chaos in the entertainment world, and eventually somebody will walk up to the artist going, “You’re one of my favorite artists. Do you need any help?” And the artist will go, “Oh man, I just had to fucking make twenty phone calls today just to make sure some ditzy thing happened.” And the person will go, “Well look, I’ll just do that for you. For a percentage of what you’re making, I’ll do all that shit you don’t wanna do.” And they’ll go, “Yeah! Fuck yeah!” And the whole thing starts up all over again. I think it would be a kinder, gentler version because what happened is that the version we’ve had for the past thirty years has been too inflated, and it’s involved too many people. And I think it’ll be a lot more direct, sort of artist management that takes care of a lot of different jobs that used to be divided amongst thousands of people. But I’m not under the misconception that it’s the marvelous new utopia.

Are you working on material for a second album?

Yeah, actually as soon as I’m done with all these interviews I’m going right into the studio. I’ve had movies and production projects and everything under the sun that’s kept me away from doing my own stuff. Now I’ve actually got a little bit of time.

How much of that is completed?

The songs are pretty much done. I’m gonna go record it.

Is “Trial and Error” making an appearance?

No, that’s actually going to be on a record that hopefully – that’s another of many projects that have been…there’s always something boiling. That’s coming out on a thing with Grant-Lee Phillips. He’s sort of had a very busy year touring his own thing, so we had to put a project aside that we were in the middle of. And now I think he’s back from touring and he’s gonna have some time, so I can wrangle him back in. He’s been a very busy man.

With good reason.

Yeah, damn straight.

Nice Work if You Can Get It

papermag, october 22nd, 2004

Nice Work If You Can Get It
Inside the Mind of Los Angeles Musical Lord Jon Brion
by Annette Stark

The pop underground scene is alive and well in Los Angeles, and one of the guys at the helm is Jon Brion, a musician and composer who has been selling out Friday night cabaret-style shows at the Fairfax District club Largo for the past eight years. That's just his night job. The rest of the week he's scoring critically acclaimed movie soundtracks -- like Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love and, most recently, the loopy, whimsical, score for David O. Russell's quirky love story I ♥ Huckabees -- and producing albums for Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright.

Not surprisingly, music has always underscored the arc of Brion's life. "Sometimes, the kind of music you listen to becomes a social badge. When I was a kid, I was very into punk," he says. "But I was too diverse for that alone. I couldn't talk with my friends about how much I liked Jimi Hendrix, and Frank Sinatra's Songs for Swingin' Lovers." This helps explain why Brion's eccentric set lists, which owe as much to American classics as they do to cabaret, knock out Largo audiences. "I think I frustrate [them]," he says with a laugh. "People say you shouldn't play a 10-minute piece, that it's self indulgent. But I grew up a jazz fanatic. And to me the notion of limiting your creative expression is absurd."

Watching him play Largo is quite a spectacle: Brion navigates the pocket-sized stage, fiddling with synthesizers, guitars, xylophones and drums while famous friends like Aimee Mann, Tom Petty, X's John Doe and Mott the Hoople's Ian Hunter file in to watch or join the fun onstage.

"I play more gigs a year than my friends who make a record and go on tour every three years. Every two years, I've played a hundred gigs." Self indulgent? Maybe, but only on Friday nights. When scoring a soundtrack, Brion works to specification. "I work with the director until he is happy. The people I choose to work with are individuals with a point of view. Everything I'm doing is through their filter."

Speaking of individuals with points of view, Brion -- a thirty-something who wears a suit and an almost '80s pop band haircut -- produced Fiona Apple's stunning sophomore album When the Pawn Hits... as well as her forthcoming Extraordinary Machine, which has been held up by the label for over a year now. (Though he can't exactly explain the hold-up, Brion did let slip something about how the label "doesn't think there are any singles.")

In addition to promoting Huckabees, Brion's been busy this fall playing voter registration benefits and jamming with friends like John Doe and Grant Lee Phillips. But on Fridays it's always back to the Largo laboratory, and more insane 10-minute songs. So, what do you exactly call this stuff? Isn't it a sort of a synth-pop-classical-jazz fusion kind of a thing? Or maybe more of a pop-synth-classical-folksy jazzy thing? "For me to explain it would take up the whole article," he laughs. "I defer to Duke Ellington. There are two kinds of music. Good and bad."

Unsung Composer Jon Brion Brings Heart to 'Huckabees'

mtv, october 14th, 2004

Unsung Composer Jon Brion Brings Heart To 'Huckabees'
Producer/songwriter wants to get back to his solo work, but film world keeps reeling him in.

To many musicians and film-geek aficionados, producer/musician/composer Jon Brion is regarded as a genius — the hot, au courant film composer of the moment.

But Brion, who scored Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," Paul Thomas Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love" and most recently, David O. Russell's existential comedy, "I Heart Huckabees," isn't a big fan of most music you'll hear in today's movies. In fact, he's downright suspicious of their motives and cross-marketing opportunities.

"I'm sick of the fact that all movies have a great deal of disparity between their scores and their songs," he lamented. "The score is just some emotional wallpaper and then the songs — they're just a gratuitous marketing plan. I don't need some band that some record company is really psyched about [getting] shoved in some scene of the movie when it has nothing to do with it. It just pisses me off."

While Brion — who has worked extensively with Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, Macy Gray and many others — might be well-known in the film and music industry, he's still far from a household name, because the projects he takes on are usually too small too be considered blockbuster and too big to be thought of as independent.

"The films [I've scored] are almost the equivalent to the records I've [produced], which is — I'm not interested in siding with the overground or with the underground. I think I probably have as much distaste for most big-budget Hollywood movies as your average indie-rocker would have for a big-budget record release."

Though he does seem to be the go-to guy for movie music, Brion's been doing his best to turn down film soundtracks in favor of solo material. But quality projects like "Huckabees" keep reeling him in. "I don't actively seek out film scores too much," he said. "I was swearing at my friend on the phone [when he said Russell was interested], saying, 'Damn you, I can't say no!' "

But instead of composing a typically atypical Brion score — both lush and whimsical in his use of peculiar instrumentation — Russell serendipitously came upon the music for the film while Brion was fiddling around at the piano with some of his older, unreleased songs.

"It was a classic tale of 'What's that!?' " Brion said of Russell's "eureka" moment upon hearing his songs. " 'Can we watch it with the scene?' And then we watched the scene with [the music], and all of the sudden, the movie had an absolute definitive feel to it."

"The themes in 'Huckabees' are, strangely, things that I've been personally obsessed with for years and have even written songs about," Brion said of the strange coincidence between his already-written lyrics and what was happening onscreen. "What people will find over time, when the vocal versions of these songs are released, is whenever [an instrumental] song is placed in the movie, its lyrics actually relate to the scene that's going on, but people won't know that right now because they're not hearing the vocals."

Though there are no conventional "songs" to speak of in the movie, the "Huckabees" soundtrack contains five songs with vocals that Brion speaks of.

Other songs recorded during the sessions could also find their way on to an undetermined Internet-only EP that Brion is eager to release in the coming months.

The highly in-demand producer and songwriter has a spate of other projects in the works. First, Brion hopes to release his first solo album in four years in March, which he describes as his characteristically "happy-go-lucky sh--."

He also has his "crazy improvisational" group Bunny (with Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg and session drummer Matt Chamberlain), and a live solo album that was recorded at Largo, the popular L.A. hotspot where Brion performs weekly and celebrity musicians have been known to join him.

But these various projects have been on Brion's plate for more than a year, so the question remains: Can he say no to the film scores that eat up his free time?

"Tomorrow I could get a call: 'The Coen brothers, Spike Jonze and Pedro Almodovar got together and decided they wanted you to do the music. And they want tuba quartets playing Cole Porter songs for the whole thing! Are you in?' What am I gonna do? Say no? I would love to receive that phone call. That would be hysterical."

The next big appearance for Brion might be on Fiona Apple's much-anticipated third album, Extraordinary Machine. That is, if the record — which has languished in label limbo for over a year — ever comes out.

"I have no clue what's going on with her record," he said. "We recorded 10 or 11 songs. Every 12 months I check in and nothing happens, so I say, 'Oh well. Maybe next year.' "

We Heart Jon Brion

entertainment today, october 8th, 2004

We ♥ Jon Brion
Local musician makes good with dark pop sensibilities and superb soundtrack music
by Antero Garcia

“There are some people I'm interested in who are making films that I would be happy to work with, and in this case a couple of them called. Simple as that,” producer, musician and film composer Jon Brion explains about crossing paths with such cutting edge, current directors as Paul Thomas Anderson, Michelle Gondry and David O. Russell.

For a musician of Brion's caliber — someone who every Friday for more than five years has been playing at West Hollywood's Largo, mixing a penchant for pop with an urge to delve into the experimental — it really is as simple as that.

In addition to having a critically acclaimed solo disc and a smattering of albums he produced, Jon Brion is also an acclaimed film composer. Having scored the last few film scores for Paul Thomas Anderson, including Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love, Brion lately branched out, working with Michelle Gondry on the score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and David O. Russell on the recently released I ♥ Huckabees. In each instance Brion finds a musical theme that closely connects with the film's emotional content.

“Hopefully there's some core notion you get early on that you hone down an area that the score inhabits, be it a stylistic thing or a presentational thing — a very clear theme that has the emotional DNA of the movie, that there's something connected on that level. If you have that, you can spit out gazillions of variations on that to your heart's content.”

Playing with an almost commercial sounding theme, the I ♥ Huckabees music quaintly captures the longing and quirky nature of Russell's “existential comedy.” Further, Brion sings a two-minute song, “Knock Yourself Out” on the soundtrack that demonstrates the philosophical nature of the film's characters. Brion sings in his signature voice about searching for “something unattainable that you can't live without.”

“I was so proud of myself for keeping it down to one and a half verses,” Brion says of his brief song. “I'm just happy that the words say their piece in the amount of time — there's not an extra bride or anything, it's just like, ‘OK, here is the point.’”

For much of his life, Brion has been committed to honing a perfect pop song. He looks for a great melody and pairs it with carefully metered and rhyming lines. After grafting these two pieces together, Brion's life work is ultimately discarded as simply dispensable pop — though it's lyrical content is of the same depth as most “serious” art.

“I think it's just a very funny, creative format,” Brion says with a chuckle. “I know — especially if its melodic, there are people who are dismissive of it. If it's not obviously dark then people think it's not heavy, which I think is a real misnomer.”

As for Brion's music, his sole solo album, Meaningless finds Beatles-esque melodies paired with dismal lyrics of depression and personal breakups. At first, the juxtaposition of upbeat melodies with dejected lyrics is disconcerting. Of course, this too is all part of Brion's carefully constructed pop plan.

“To me it's nice to have a balance of dark and light because I don't think either thing explains the way things are,” Brion explains about melding happy melodies with dark lyrics. “I don't think either thing is completely honest to the complexity of life”

Though Brion has produced and played instruments on countless records including those of Macy Gray, Badly Drawn Boy and — yes — that's also him playing the lead guitar line on the Wallflowers' hit “One Headlight,” he explains that he feels he is most collaborative while working on film scores.

“The film scoring has just my name on it but I've begun to wonder if I should start to put the director's name on it” Brion says modestly.

Unlike most film composers that work largely in a secluded environment, Brion insists on having a close working relationship with each film's director.

“I actually tend to work playing to the film like it's a silent film. The director and I sit and watch the movie and I play music with them there and we discuss it.”

The effort is time consuming and Brion admits to getting frustrated occasionally during the scoring process. However, ultimately, it's clear that the results are more dynamic than most flat film scores today. Further, Brion notices that all three of the directors he has worked with share similar personality traits.

“They all have pretty crazy metabolisms,” Brion explains. “They can all operate at that humming bird metabolism. Even if they all have a severe drop off, they've all got that. They are always multi-tasking all the time.”

And though Brion enjoys the fast-moving nature of each director, he admits it's a trait he also sees in himself. With a huge repetoire of songs that have never been released to the public, Brion's personal catalog of songs covers nearly every topic, something that contiues to show up on each of his film scores. For Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, Brion discusses love in terms of memory in an aged original song, “Strings the Tie to You.” Of course Huckabees benefits from Brion's preexisting songs as well.

“The soundtrack is songs of mine that have been lying around that I've never released. They are instrumental versions of these preexisting songs. A lot of the songs that the score is based on are as much as 15 years old. It's stuff that's just a part of the library of crap in my head.”

Besides the film scores recently released, Brion is also awaiting the official release of the third Fiona Apple album, the second that he has produced. However, the album's release has been postponed month after month as the label claims it fails to yield a commercial single. However, the latest word is that it'll be put out early next year — though Brion isn't holding his breath.

“Eventually all that stuff is going to leak out on the Internet and I feel bad for [Apple] and that's something I don't want,” Brion says. “Also you have to remember that a few years ago, she was all but ready to quit the business, and if they keep making decisions like this, who would blame her?”

In addition to working on a solo album and unwinding after the current Huckabees frenzy, Brion is currently collaborating in an improvised trio with musician Matt Chamberlain and former Soul Coughing member Sebastian Steinberg.

“We've started a weird improvisational band. It's the opposite of most recording projects I've been involved in. It's just absolutely ‘that's what we played. . . that must be the record!’” Brion says with a laugh. Continuing to disregard the traditional path for musicians in any environment, Brion thrusts the musical vocabulary forward.

I Heart Jon Brion

venice, october 2004

I ♥ Jon Brion
An Existential Composer Finds His Home at Huckabees

In a town where tunes can be terminally hip, Jon Brion might be the craziest, and smartest, musical Avant-Gardist out there. Leaping between instruments and styles with the verve of a one-man band, Brion's music is pure Looney Tunes brilliance, a carnival where wonky percussion, lush themes, and rock-folk rhythms create the most distinctive film scores in Hollywood. From Magnolia's somber orchestral repetitiveness to the aggressive percussion of Punch-Drunk Love, and the time-bending musical effects of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jon Brion's scores push the psychological and sonic envelop.

Where many film scores are homogeneous, Jon Brion's music demands to be noticed. Beautifully at points, surreally at others, and sometimes just plain savagely. Love it or hate it, Brion's music has the kind of unique strangeness that makes you wonder what the hell you're listening to -- as opposed to just receiving a calm musical brainwave. It's a talent that serves Brion mighty well when it comes to scoring I ♥ Huckabees (available on Milan Records), an existential comedy that might leave any other composer scratching his head. But not Jon Brion, who's gone for the eccentric gusto once again.

Jon Brion is the Alice through the looking glass of Hollywood's film composers, each film getting stranger and stranger, curiouser and curiouser. Starting with Hard Eight's relatively straightforward tale of two Vegas hustlers, Brion's work for director Paul Thomas Anderson has dealt with Magnolia's tapestry of mad coincidences and the romantic insanity of Punch-Drunk Love. Going outside of Anderson's hemisphere with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Brion played a relationship regressing through time.

Now with I ♥ Huckabees, Jon Brion teams with the equally offbeat director David O. Russell (Flirting with Disaster, Spanking the Monkey) for this surreal gumshoe story. To try to sum up what might be the most bizarre major Hollywood release since Videodrome, Jason Schwartzman plays Albert, an econerd who hires "existential detectives" Dustin Hoffman and Lilly Tomlin to make sense of the coincidences that fill up his pathetic life. Albert's gradually drawn into their client base, a circle of addled misfits that include a disillusioned fireman (Mark Wahlberg), a conniving department store publicist (Jude Law), and his frantic wife (Naomi Watts) who's the eyecatching model for the Huckabees chain of department stores.

With not much in the way of a linear plot, Huckabees is more like a string of surreal incidents, whose participants try to figure out the meaning of life. Such as it is. And Brion's music is there at every strange turn to get into their subconscious with a mind-bending miasma of a classical piano playing, a blasting Wurlitzer organ, and contemplative accordion among the score's seemingly endless instruments. Whether he's playing them like a silent movie accompanist on mushrooms, a cool jazz detective, or singing the title song with the sound-alike magic of Paul McCartney, I ♥ Huckabees' score is a delight for the mind and the senses.

A native of New Jersey, Jon Brion's talents as a multi-instrumental arranger and singer started him off in the rock and alternative scene, where he's played with Macy Gray, Elliott Smith, and Robyn Hitchcock. Brion remains just as active in this arena, producing albums for Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple, and Aimee Mann while managing to sell-out L.A.'s Largo cafe on Friday night for eight years running -- all while currently rushing to finish the Huckabees album.

Indeed, watching Jon Brion work his magic at Largo's improvisational show is like seeing an eager, mad-scientist child who's been given a stage full of wonderful toys that he can't wait to play with. But for all of his music's complexity, Brion's melodies have a simple, child-like innocence to them. There's always some kind of melody to his madness. And now having just made his Huckabees deadline with a few hours of sleep to spare, Jon Brion talks about his distinctively strange and beautiful approach to film scoring.

Venice: Do you think that your music's style has made you the "go to" guy for quirky films like I ♥ Huckabees?
Jon Brion: I wouldn't consider my music overground or underground. I just want it to have an emotional and intellectual accessibility. And because scoring a movie is such a time-consuming matter, you're doomed if you don't like the film. So I've just taken films that I've liked.

What kind of director does it take to work with you?
If I'm interested in a movie, then it means someone is trying to do something different to begin with. And that means we'll get along, however strenuous the job is. When you come on a movie, it's been this guy's entire life for two years. And this is the last chance to make any creative difference in their own movie. And even though it might not be reflected budget-wise, music is a huge part of how the movie comes off. l think people like Bernard Herrmann are the proof of that. He's intrinsically part of the tension in his Alfred Hitchcock films. Try watching some of the scenes in Psycho without his score, and it's amazing how little tension there is in them.

Would you describe yourself as being an "existential" composer?
I hadn't thought of that! [laughs] But then by description, I think we all are "existential," whether we want to admit it or not. We're all stuck in this crap. And I'm certainly not interested in making "standard" music. So by nature of what I do, my music is Avant-Garde.

How would you describe your music, or do you think that's even possible?
Hopefully, I can't describe what my music sounds like. I'd certainly say my scores are different in terms of what you'd call "movie music." That's part of the fun, because it's more interesting to find music that will juxtapose with the movie, yet still be part of its life force. The first film I did was for Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight, which I scored with Michael Penn. A lot of it was a 1950s jazz organ trio, done in the style of Booker T. Washington. The score also had a bunch of "sound scapey" things in it. Then I did Magnolia, which was composed in an extraordinarily dense, highly repetitive "classical" style. Punch-Drunk Love had modernistic and weird percussive pieces, mixed with light, old-fashioned French-style chamber music. My score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doesn't resemble any of that, and I don't think I ♥ Huckabees is like anything else I've composed. So I don't think I'm looked at as a person with a "fixed" sound.

Do you think there's an almost childlike sound to your music?
I'd say it's the sound of arrested adolescence, but a well cultivated arrested adolescence!

How did you find your style?
My dad was a conductor, so there were a lot of different types of music in the house. So I naturally gravitated towards becoming a musician, and was driven to be self-taught. It was never conscious. I just knew that I wanted to play a lot of different things. I took up the piano, drums, and the guitar. Soon, my parents spotted that I was going to be a lifer for music, and they knew there was no way around it. All parents want their kids to survive in the world, and my mother advised me to find some other interests. So I took her advice to the letter, and made sure that I had something to fall back on. I concentrated on writing music in case playing instruments didn't work out, and also playing around with tape recorders, since I'd always had an interest in the technical aspect of sound. But even though I had the opposite reaction of what my mother wanted, what I did was exactly what she intended in the long run -- which was to educate myself about everything musical that I could. I made her advice work for me.

With so many instruments that you play, would you also consider yourself a one-man band?
I'm interested in the overall experience. There are people who want to be known as songwriters. But to me, writing songs is just symptomatic of my more global interests. To me, doing things is what's interesting. So it's not like I want to be known as a multi-instrumentalist.

There's the sense that you're making it up as you go along with your scores, particularly with I ♥ Huckabees.
I'm a devoted improviser. And, in essence, anyone who composes is improvising. But how much they allow that sense of fun to be retained is another matter. There's a surrealist attitude that says if you completely, and utterly let go, then there's going to be this information that's going to come out of your subconscious mind, which will be far more complex than something you would consciously create. I absolutely agree with that, because you have a vast amount of brainpower that's going on when you're creating something. So when I compose a film, I want to do it with the director. I just want to sit in front of a keyboard, with a guitar and improvise while he watches, like I would if I was watching a silent movie. Then the challenge becomes figuring out how to attach myself to the director's nervous system.

I ♥ Huckabees is sort of a detective movie as well as an existential comedy. How did your music try to hit both approaches?
There's definitely a bunch of Henry Mancini-style cues in the film, especially in the scene where the detectives are going through the trash at Jude Law's house. That's something I picked up right off the bat when I watched the film. I felt there was a weird sense of Technicolor fun to Huckabees, like you'd find in the early Pink Panther movies. And I ♥ Huckabees has a combination of a mock-serious tone and goofiness, which is a very interesting balance to have going.

Was that your general direction for the score?
It was one. All of the directors I've worked with have a similar sense of experimentation. And with David O. Russell's movies, I didn't see someone who was trying to just be a director. He has points he's trying to get across. And most people who are of that mind tend to be very open to experimentation early in the scoring process, until they finally sift through the music later in the game. When we started Huckabees, everything was up for grabs. Its first temporary score had a lot of solo classical piano pieces. Then I had the idea of using a plaintive, human voice in the score. That would tell people who thought of Huckabees as being a pure intellectual exercise that this story was in fact about a very "human" thing, which would be conveyed by the music's voice. So David took my comment and put a lot of opera into the next screening, when I was thinking just the opposite. Opera's use of voice is very dramatic, and takes center stage. For Huckabees, I was thinking about voices becoming the sound of humanity, which would be going on in the background, in a very gentle way. Suddenly, I thought, "Oh, I'm writing an opera!" It would've been fun, because I don't know much about opera, and I'm not specifically a fan of it. That approach would've made I ♥ Huckabees unlike any score I'd done. When it came time to actually score the movie, I'd written some pseudo-classical piano pieces. Dave and I sat in front of a grand piano for two days. Then he said, "I just want a lot of good feeling." And I thought, "Wow." I usually have to neutralize too much feeling when I'm playing, because directors will often say, "I didn't put that emotion there. What's that music doing there?" Now I had the opportunity to talk to David about something that had been bugging me, which is that soundtrack music has become emotional wallpaper. They're tuneless affairs, and the songs are gratuitously put in to sell the record company's other bands. There's something about really having songs being intrinsically part of the movie. And my favorite scores like The Third Man used just a single instrument to create these great songs. I also loved the great, tuneful scores that Henry Mancini wrote. David was completely open to my ideas. So I asked him for ten minutes to take myself out of film composer mentality, and to put myself into songwriter mode. I started playing one-finger melodies that I'd been working on for my record. Then it was the classical moment of a director saying, "What's that? Let's watch it to picture." And immediately there was the juxtaposition that David and I were looking for. And better yet, the songs were right on with what was happening in I ♥ Huckabees. Those melodies became the film's soundtrack. It's crazy that it even happened that way.

There's a definite Beatles sound to your voice, and the songs you've done for Huckabees and Punch-Drunk Love.
I don't actively try to sound that way, and removed elements from my songs that would compare me to The Beatles. But I finally had to acquiesce to the fact that sound is part of my mode of expression, from the sonics to the feel. If you write a truly melodic song to a rock beat, and God forgive you if it has guitars, then the song ends up being Beatle-esque. At this point in my life, I don't feel like hiding those impulses anymore. But what's really embarrassing is that people think I'm trying to be that way. If I really was, I could probably sound better than most of the bands that run around trying to sound like the Beatles. It would be a cakewalk! While that kind of deliberate emulation is easy, it's also nothing to be proud of.

There's a wonderful cue in Huckabees where you play a bike "chase" like a silent movie pianist would. But here you do it on a Wurlitzer organ.
That moment in Huckabees is very much a silent movie chase scene, which cracked me up. But it's so fucking ridiculous because it begins when Mark Wahlberg tries to stop the detectives from chasing Jason Schwartzman. So what does he do? He puts a bicycle in front of them! And no one is even chasing Mark and Jason when they ride away. That made the scene one of my favorite moment's to score. And I'm a big fan of silent movies, which was an inspiration for bringing the mighty Wurlitzer into Huckabees. I realized there was an instrument built 80 years ago to accompany movies. It had all the power of an orchestra, plus sound effects. Few people have used the Wurlitzer in a score since talkies came in. But everything you need for a movie score is in this instrument.

Your music can sometimes be akin to sound effects. Can that be dangerous when you've got so much going on with the dialogue and visuals of your films -- particularly when you're working with P.T. Anderson?
I'm not responsible for the sound mix in any of my films, and Paul Anderson tends to mix things louder than I think they should be. He likes it when people have to strain to hear the dialogue. And what he achieves from that is something that affects your physiology. His films push you to the edge, which is right where he wants you.

But do you want to be confrontational in how your music plays with the film?
I think like Paul Anderson; I'm interested in breaking up the way people are scoring things. And I make that self-evident. Stuff of mine jumps out in ways that movie soundtracks aren't supposed to do. You could call it inconsiderate. But I view it as causing some kind of juxtaposition with the film that's interesting. Remember, there's nothing in any film that I've scored that wasn't okayed by the director. It's always their choice. I have nothing to do with whether the music is too loud or too soft. But I'll try and subvert the current "rules" of what film music's supposed to be, whenever it's possible. I think there's an original truth about what a movie score is supposed to do, which is to keep you engaged with the movie, and to give it a sensibility. I learned that from Paul. He's so gifted in understanding the marriage between sound and movies. And when I say sound, I mean everything, from the way the dialogue's recorded to how he plays his music with visual images. I think Paul's sensibility is heightened above any other person who's making movies today. He's much more concerned with the music giving you a complete sense of experience, so that it stays in your head. Paul's not trying to be realistic, because what you think of as being "realistic" in a film isn't realistic in real life. People don't hear subtle string music going on all the time, which is what happens in fucking movies. So if you want to be real, you've got to hit people on all levels of their senses. Paul sees movies as complete sensory experiences. So if he doesn't want you to hear the dialogue, then it's for a reason. And I think that approach is beautiful, poetic, and cool. It's way beyond how directors normally work, and I've always trusted Paul because of that. When he hears something that I do that he likes, then that's the way it's going to be, and it's not going to change. That's special, and I've carried Paul's sense of audacity into my scores. But whatever amount of audacity is in there, it's not to spite the picture. It really isn't, even if it seems that way to someone at first. But the more they watch the film, then they'll see the music has more merit to the image than something that would follow the film scoring rulebook.

You've scored these completely eccentric films like I ♥ Huckabees. But if someone asked you to do a "mainstream" score, would you be interested?
As a creative person, I reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. But if something came along, and the challenge was to do something that was completely standard, yet still remain interesting, then that would be great fun for me. But it would have to be at a particular moment in my life, and it would have to be a good film. I'm not against "popular" films. I have no aversion to success, and in fact, I take films because they'd be interesting for other human beings to see -- never mind if my music was in it or not. There are moments when, culturally, the things that are popular are the things that are good. Say the George Gershwins, Hank Williams, and Bob Dylans of the world. Or look at the filmmakers in the 1930s and the 1970s. People were making artistic, groundbreaking films like The Godfather, which was hugely successful, as well as good. I think that the people I work with are informing the language of movies. And one of these people at some point is going to make a film that's going to be more than semi-popular. Take Paul Thomas Anderson. He's going to be more than an acknowledged taste. He's going to explode. And that will be great, because he's a bad-ass who deserves it. I'm a pissed-off moviegoer. I've kind of stopped going to movies, because I'm sick or paying money to go to see dumb movies that can't hold my attention for even a second. I mean, who do we go and club? Who's making this crap? It's awful! So for now, my choices are based on something being an "outsider" movie.

But don't you think your scores, and their movies show that there's hope for the left-of-center to make it in Hollywood?
Well, I think there's always hope in this bleak-seeming world. At some point, I, or any of my compatriots, might do something that becomes wildly successful. And everyone in the business will say, "I always loved those guys!" I hope that I ♥ Huckabees isn't automatically marginalized. David O. Russell is taking on big issues that people aren't able to talk about, for fear of sounding pretentious. And this movie deals with big things in a plain-spoken way, which is why I'm so attracted to it. Huckabees could have come off like a first-year college student talking about Franz Kafka. But instead it's this sweet, endearing thing that talks about the conundrum of existence. This movie isn't so much to swallow as people might think, and I hope they find out how entertaining I ♥ Huckabees is. I hope that audiences find the entertainment value of Paul Anderson's movies in that way. And I think it will happen. So is there hope? Ab-so-fucking-lutely!

Bluntly Speaking: An Emily Blunt Interview

Bluntly Speaking | Jon Brion
an emily blunt interview

Bluntly speaking? Since childhood I've been a composer geek. For Show & Tell I'd bring in my Victrola and play Bartok, converting some and, inevitably, sparring off a few uncreatives amongst us - careful their blows didn't connect with my 78 rpm treasure. "Hit the face and spare the vinyl," I always said.

But alas, I cannot play a note - was just given "the ear." Perhaps that's why when I hear orchestrations whipped up from that extraordinary mixture of pure talent and glorious individualism, as with musician extraordinaire Jon Brion, I've been known to weep.

He's a writer, producer, and parlayer of "Unpopular Pop" (see interview for explanation). Brion also dabbles in film scoring - which has given him a Grammy-nod (Magnolia) and great acclaim outside of an already loyal following that trade his Largo tavern cd bootlegs, with the enthusiasm of exquisite wine connoisseurs.

His latest scoring work is attached to David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees. It's unfair to say, "It's his best work," 'cause it's all his best. In fact he shared, the main theme, 'Monday,' was actually hibernating in the 'Brion Songbook of Musical Glee,' for three years. It just fit. So his latest work includes his older work which is now new, again.

When offered to actually speak with the man who has created so many pieces I adore, our modern day Debussy if you will, I broke into a sweat. The fact that on top of being a remarkable lyric spinner, multi-instrumentalist, and melodic maestro, he's also absolutely ah-dorable and that had me in a slight state-o-panic. Where do we start? And what if I swoon like some deranged fan that's found her way backstage at studio 50?

Emily: First let me thank you for your political efforts. I understand you just attended a fundraiser for Kerry?

Jon: Yeah, I was up there in Seattle being a loudmouth. [laughter]

Emily: Bravo. I'd like to start with how you conjure up these notes for film. I mean, I see you alone in an Edward Scissorhandsy castle studio - eighty instruments - tinkling.

Jon: There's a little bit of that goin' on - yeah. I think most film composers work in isolation. I tend to work with the director as much as possible. It's more the two of us watching the movie together trying to come to common ground.

Emily: How do you key - so to speak - into a character so keenly? Especially with Jason Schwartzman's character in Huckabees - the music fit the "persona" so exactly.

Jon: Yeah, well then you'll be very amused to know that piece of music ['Monday'] - the recording of it - had been lying around for three years! [laughter]

Emily: That's amazing! It was instant character description via music.

Jon: When David [O. Russell] kept talking about the feeling he wanted, and I saw - watched - the music he related to, I knew there were some things that might give him that response. And he walked in the studio one day and I said, "I have a present for you. You might like it." And he was dancing around like "Oh-my-God!" He ended up using that piece of music a few places in the movie. Mind you that's after we'd been hanging out for weeks - watching the movie together, talking, having dinner talking about everything - talking about the universe! [laughter] He loves to do that and so do I. So we got on like a house on fire!

Emily: Well the movie shines for it. I understand you have no formal training - and how many instruments do you play?

Jon: Ohhh. It's not that many. People have this crazy idea that I play everything under sun. Everything I play is based on piano, guitar or drums. If it's a marimba or say xylophone? The keys are laid out like a piano - but you play them with drumsticks. I can play piano and I can play drums so yeah and of those types of instruments are easy for me to play. And almost shouldn't be counted. And I'm self-taught.

Emily: Amazing! You're such a sought after musical producer-with your own sound - yet you let other talents' abilities ring - how do you chose whom you'd produce?

Jon: The same way I chose directors. If I think they're good. If I think they have something to offer - if I think they're individuals. I am not really interested in somebody who isn't. The people I'm attracted to are already smart and trying to figure out how to communicate with people. They wanna make something different. It's the same in "Film Soundtrack World." The kinda people who wanna use me don't want the standard soundtrack to begin with. We chose each other carefully. I'm a very grateful for those associations. And they are not all accidental I could have chosen to work with really crappy people! [laughter]

Emily: Yeah but you haven't. In fact, more so than any other I can find, your scoring list is for the who's who of intelligent individual filmmakers.

Jon: Bravo.

Emily: David O. Russell said you're the greatest musical collaborator he's met and Michel Gondry said you are a wizard at reading a director's thoughts for a scene. How do you work with directors - giving them what they want yet keeping your voice?

Jon: Well, I'm making all the music regardless - I'm generating all the ideas - and this is what I developed working with Paul Anderson [the director of Magnolia etc.] - I am watching the director watching their movie. Music has a physiological effect you can feel it. You know. You can put on a Marvin Gaye record and people start tapping their foot. And it's not accidental he made the music to do that. A lot of people are afraid to talk about this kind of stuff because they think it demystifies it - but I violently disagree with that. The really great stuff? No matter how much you talk about it, or how much you pick it apart, it's still part of the great mystery - so for me…I just watch them watching their movie. And by the time I'm working with them they'd been working with the movie for two years. In fact maybe past the point of always having an emotional response.

Emily: You have a clever phrase that seems to be associated with you that you invented - can you tell me about "Unpopular pop?"

Jon: It's just because when people say pop music now they're often talking about just melodic songwriters, especially some with some angle on the lyrics. It's not actually "popular" music. Popular music is Brittany Spears. You know people would refer to Aimee Mann stuff as pop but I've never really heard a song of hers on the radio. Ya, I've heard a song of hers on the radio maybe three times the entire time we've known each other [since 1980's-ish]. She doesn't sell Brittany sized units and I don't think it is "Pop Music." I think that's a dangerous term to use…unfair for her and the Elliott Smiths of the world. Its not meant to be a denigrating term - it's for lack of being able to call it anything else. I thought it was funny because people Jon Brion in the studiohave forgotten where the term came from and the whole notion of Pop Art. People were like, "Okay how do we use these commercial things and use that as our fodder for making creative stuff?" [here we go kids: Music History 101 with Jon Brion - how cool is this ->] Pop music is a term that came up for popular music that came up after the twenties. It was used for Gershwin, and Porter and Irving Berlin. That was an interesting moment where the people who were really good intelligent songwriters were also the most successful. You had to be thoughtful. And you had to have great memorable melodies to be a success at that time. It just hasn't been the case in recent history. Melody is not a requirement. Thoughtfulness isn't a requirement. Lyrics making sense or being original? Absolutely is not part of the requirement! The most interesting ground breaking music has usually been in hip-hop. It hasn't been in rock and it hasn't been in top 40. I think there's inventiveness in the Elliott Smiths, Tom Yorks, Bjorks, Aimee Manns and Fiona Apples.

Emily: So who are your influences? I hear a lot of Beatlesque-y stuff in your music?

Jon: Oh yeah. And that's the primary obvious one. And I'm embarrassed by how inescapable it is for me.

Emily: Sorry.

Jon: No-no it's all right. In fact I think a lot of people in bands are trying to figure out how to get those sort of sounds, and do those sort of things and they're very conscientiously trying to be retro. They're only thinking, "That's cool." And I'm actually not trying to do that. I am actively trying to do that - I'm usually leaving elements out 'cause I'm like, "Oh, that's too many Beatle elements…" I try to always have some thing in there - in the song element - that maybe wouldn't have been there had it been them. But I've kind just acquiesced to the fact that, that, is part of my mode of expression. I at times try really hard to avoid it but it's part of a natural language to me.

Emily: [could he be cuter? I'm pleadin' with him to be cuter…] What's the oddest instrument you've found and play?

Jon: I dunno. I think many people would think many of them are odd. But I don't know if I think that any of them are odd. Everything I heard made some sound that was unique and hence that's what made it beautiful. My friends all have the same "oddball" instruments and we all know the same ones - there's this single gene pool of of toys and thing that use to be state or the art and are not anymore [laughter]. A friend of mine instead of putting a shaker on a track one time, he picked up a bottle of rubbing alcohol and we used that as part of the rhythm track! He was shaking it made a yuswooshgghagagaswiach sound. Something like that is more unique to me than say, just some weird instrument I picked up in a music store.

Emily: I saw you at Largo and watched in amazement as you played all the instruments and accompanied yourself via a sampler on 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps'…

Jon: Argh - the fucking Beatles again! [laughter] I can't escape it.

Emily: [laughter] Yes, sorry but it was friggin' nirvana. I then took friends back, to tune them in, and you did this mad 'America the Beautiful' version with the string quartet, The Section - starting with standard and pomp then twirling into a hip-hop dub session of musical mayhem including clever Bush excerpts pumped in [I guess] from the sound man. I was positively blown away. [*sigh*]

Jon Brion at Huckabees premiere

Jon: Thanks! That's what it's about. There's no set list. As long as humans keep showing up and paying attention I will keep doing it. I've chosen to do something where both my work and and my life are integrated and both are happening simultaneous every hour I'm awake.

Emily: Have you achieved what you want in life?

Jon: There's more to do than I could possibly do before I die. There's no such thing as achieving everything I want - and I have felt like a "success" for a really long time.

Emily: Right on. Any more solo albums in the works now that you finished Huckabees?

Jon: Yeah actually! I am not taking on anything so I can do some solo stuff. That's the plan - we'll see. [laughter]

"Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic" - Oscar Wilde
…And discovering Jon Brion's music is a good start.

The Song That's Shaking Me

The Song That's Shaking Me
by Andy Van Baal
10.03.2004

Although all the molecules of the entity called Jon Brion are contained in a single human form, for the purpose of categorization there are really three Jon Brions: there's the one who arranges whimsical, staccato little instrumental pieces (his distinctive scores for Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), the one who oozes sentimental, elegiac pop ballads shot through with Brian Wilson and Billie Holiday ("Ruin My Day" and "Trial and Error"), and then there's Jon Brion the virtuoso mad scientist, a mop-headed character with the bright eyes of a child who makes a living playing with his favorite toys, hopping around the tiny stage at Largo in Los Angeles (where he's held a weekly residence for over eight years) from instrument to instrument, building up and breaking down an impressively wide-ranging primer of 20th century pop (from Cole Porter and Les Paul to Cheap Trick and Nirvana), spinning knobs and stomping pedals of modulation and distortion, striking the exposed strings of his prepared piano, fingering tiny melodies on a tiny Casio keyboard, instigating shiny happy audience sing-alongs, indulging in between-song "lulls" and wry observational banter, equally adept at picking Hawaiian slack-key guitar as he is programming beats and feedback loops, as comfortable sitting in with a traditional bluegrass trio as he is jamming with a confused mariachi trumpeter who happened to be walking by Largo at the wrong (right?) time.

Though I appreciate the first two, the latter is my favorite Jon Brion (obviously - he gets a lot more description than the others). The latter is the Jon Brion I got to sit in with once (pianist for impromptu audience-assembled rock band), and the latter is the Jon Brion that recorded "Sorry Suzanne" for the Hollies' tribute album Sing Hollies In Reverse.

I haven't heard the Hollies' recording so I could be wrong, but I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that Brion's version probably bears little, if any, resemblance to the original. Ostensibly (or maybe occasionally) it's a pop song, but it's far too manic and odd to ever really qualify as such. This is, of course, Brion's quandary in a larger sense - his debut album was dumped by Atlantic because they couldn't find an appropriate demographic to market it to (the new Brion-produced Fiona Apple album is presently undergoing similar problems).

The man himself jokingly stated he shouldn't have been allowed in a studio after recording this track, but for the duration of the song (and Brion's shows, and whatever trajectory his career may take) let's forget about the business world's need to analyze and categorize, and let's forget about the critic's need to do the same (this of course divests me of having to write anything more about it), and let's just say that if you're making music and you want to throw in a synthesizer's full range of effects, or a bed of warbled static noise, or twenty layers of overdubbed harmonies, just for the hell of it, you can, and though the end result may be wacky, self-indulgent, and stylistically all over the map, if you do it right, it might be all the more brilliant for it.

Jon Brion IGN Interview

ign, september 30th, 2004

Jon Brion Interview
Composer/musician discusses working on the score for I ♥ Huckabees.
by Spence D.

September 30, 2004 - When it comes to the world of film composition the name Jon Brion doesn't ring with the time honored familiarity of the likes of John Williams, Henry Mancini, Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith or even newer composers such as Carter Burwell. This isn't because Brion is any less competent at the craft, but more because he is extremely careful about the films he chooses to be attached to. That is to say, he's not a full-time film composer, but rather a musician who dabbles in the trade when a project reaches out and grabs him.

In fact, within the spectrum of Hollywood film composers, Brion is something of an anomaly. He's a multi-instrumentalist who plays everything from the guitar to the harmonium, he's a producer who has worked on albums by the likes of Fiona Apple, Robyn Hitchcock, and The Eels, among others, and he's a live performer who has been holding down a Friday night headlining gig at the hip LA nightspot Largo for more than eight years now.

In terms of his cinematic work, to date, Brion has fully scored four films, two by Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love), one by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and most recently David O. Russell's philosophical satire I ♥ Huckabees. What sets his scores apart from the more "traditional" symphonic compositions that usually accompany films is that Brion plays a variety of off-kilter instruments—ranging from the mellotron to the optigan—that create a whimsical, fractured fairy tale vibe that runs the emotional gamut from bittersweetly hypnotic to nightmarishly ominous, all the while keeping it grounded in a warm, organic tonal quality. Suffice it to say, you won't hear another composer's crafting music for films that sounds anything like the soundscapes that Brion concocts.

Spence D., IGN Music's Editor-in-Chief, recently caught up with Brion between premiers and recording sessions, to discuss his unique approach to the world of film composition.
Spence D., Editor-in-Chief, IGN Music: One of the projects you been doing for quite some time now is performing on Friday nights at Largo in Los Angeles. I believe you've been doing that for going on eight years now. That's a long time.

Jon Brion: Yep.

IGN Music: And you haven't tired of doing that yet?

JB: No, because if I'm bored then it's my fault [laughs], you know.

IGN Music Cool. So, shifting a bit from your live gigs into your most recent project, which is the score for I ♥ Huckabees, how did you get hooked up with David O. Russell for that?

JB: It was pretty simple. As far as I'm concerned, any work you get is because people have heard other work you've done. And the only reason they hire you is they want to co-opt some of what you do 'cause they think it'll make what they do better. And I mean everything that I do—like doing sessions, doing a movie soundtrack, producing a record, writing a song with a person. The only reason people want to do it is because they've heard something else you've done, you know? That's the only way any of it actually happens.

IGN Music: Then to put it in a nutshell, David had heard some of the stuff you've done, liked it, and contacted you.

JB: Yeah.

IGN Music: Now when you go into a project like this, how much of a collaboration exists? I realize it can differ from project to project, but did David give you free reign or did he provide input, how did it pan out?

JB: Oh most of it [was a collaboration] really.

IGN Music: Is it safe to say that you were brought in early on the project?

JB: No, but whether I am or not really doesn't matter. The people I choose to work with, I work with because I'm already impressed with them, you know? The movies I take are movies that I'm interested in. I've made a point of not being, say what I refer to as a "careerist" about anything. If I only produced records I'd have to fill my calendar all year round with records I didn't care about. And it's the same with films. If I just took films to score all the time…

IGN Music:…you'd be continuously employed but probably not doing what you'd really enjoy doing, huh?

JB: Yeah. I wouldn't be particularly happy. But by waiting to work with Paul Anderson or Michel Gondry or Charlie Kaufman or David O. Russell, you know, that's a pleasure. Even the hard parts of the work are a pleasure because you feel like you're involved in something good. And it's very easy to collaborate with people who are talented 'cause even if it's tough, you're very happy to defer to them, you know? I can defer to any of these people going 'They've made so many creative things that have inspired me and I don't know what their process is to get there.' So if there's ever a moment that comes up where I think it should be one thing and they think it should be another, it's really easy to just go 'Well, you know, you've made all this other great stuff that I get enjoyment from, so I'll trust your spine, I'll trust you're instincts.' I actually think the soundtracks I do are more collaborative than the average film composer, 'cause the average film composer who works all the time is so tired of dealing with the politics of it that they all have their own home studios that they work in and they don't want people coming by. They want to work privately, send tapes, get comments on them, make the changes from the comments, and do the sessions and that's it. Whereas in general I'm sitting with the directors and we're watching the films together and I'm composing while we're sitting there. Which is another reason why I have to be very careful about what I pick. Because if I was working with somebody and I didn't actually like their movie that much and they were realizing the amount of options I could generate and they were taking them just for the sake of taking them and it wasn't making something more emotional or more interesting or cool or creative, I'd have such a horrible time. As it is, it's a lot of work, but it's rewarding.

IGN Music: You mentioned that you have no idea what these filmmaker's thought processes are to create the films they do. Similarly, they probably don't have a clue as to what your thought process is in crafting your music.

JB: No, it's completely mysterious! You know, at the Huckabees premier I met a guy whose been one of the main conspirators on The Simpsons since its inception. And he was sort of saying to me 'Oh, it's so intimidating what you do just musically.' And he was talking about musicians in general and sort of saying 'I always wanted to be a musician, but you guys just have these crazy brains to be able to do that.' And I was just trying to explain to him 'No, music is easy. It's got 12 characters. That's about half of what we deal with in the English language. The English language is a hundred times harder than music. And there's so many absolutely genius musicians who are incredibly stupid people that will back my theory up.' We went our separate ways at the party and I realized that I was finally able to relate it for him. So I said 'Hey, you know how you turn on the TV and you see these 5-year old kids who can play violin like a virtuoso? You might complain that they could be a little more seasoned or emotional, but they're doing it, right? How many 5-year old comedians have you seen that can knock it out of the park? None.' And he looked at me and said 'Wow, that's really reassuring.' And I said 'Man, I'm not being self-deprecating. It's just the truth.' Music looks very formidable to people outside of it and it looks like it's this realm of spooky genius. And it's not. It's this very, very simple language that is capable of creating very complex human response and abstract thought and emotion and in terms of architectural thought, it does really cool things. And I'm so enamored with it that I intend to do it until they put me in the ground. But in terms of the actual brainpower necessary to do it and do it well, somebody who has a good sense of what analogy is and can apply it to their playing, can make great stuff no matter what their technical ability is.