“Why finish a song when you can start a new one?” Jon Brion once quipped to the New York Times Magazine. It was 2003, and he was wrapping work on Fiona Apple’s as-yet unnamed third record. Once that was complete, he told the interviewer, he would focus on his own music. A couple years prior, he had self-released his solo debut, Meaningless. The album featured his unshowy mastery of vintage instruments and a compositional sense indebted to the legendary singer/songwriters of ’70s Los Angeles: the exact qualities that had made Brion an in-demand session player, writer, and producer. But his label declined to put it out. Some combination of that experience, his perfectionism, and a steady stream of outside work kept him from ever releasing a follow-up.
But new Brion material did appear, in a sense. In 2006, a collection of his demos hit the blogopshere. They were purportedly recorded in 1991 and 1995, before and after he moved to Los Angeles. A loose and lo-fi set of earnest, harmonically sophisticated pop-rock, the demos were revelatory to devotees of what Brion himself termed “unpopular pop.” Portland musician Mo Troper—who first encountered Brion via his hired-gun guitar on Jellyfish’s 1993 cult LP Spilt Milk—is one of those devotees. His latest album, Troper Sings Brion, is a tribute with a twist: These are all songs that Brion never officially released. Troper’s recent output has tended toward deconstruction: 90-second doses of pitch-shifted and saturated power-pop. But here, he plays things mostly straight. Like Harry Nilsson did on the LP that this album’s title and Emma Parry’s cover art riff on, Troper puts his idiosyncrasies in service of the material. In doing so, he posits Jon Brion not as a composer or vibes merchant, but as an L.A. songwriter of the first order.
Troper comes out swinging with “Into the Atlantic,” Brion’s sardonic tour of the recording-industry hellscape. There’s no demo recording of this song available, just a few stripped-down live bootlegs, so Troper weaves a pocket symphony around Brion’s quarter-note piano: Harp, Mellotron, and squeezebox dip in and out of the mix. The result would fit snugly on a record by Aimee Mann, who fought the same label battles as Brion in the ‘90s, sometimes alongside him. Here, the song’s ambivalence about its own fate makes it the ideal intro for a set of unreleased tunes: “And when it’s time to baptize your own baby/Never mind that dorsal fin/And throw the little morsel in.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
