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."