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.