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.