Jon Brion is all over the new Jerry Lee Lewis album I posted about.
Although many people don’t know him very well, Brion is a fixture in the music world, he definitively is a behind-the-scene person and has produced albums by Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright, Eleni Mandell, The Crystal Method, Elliott Smith, Rhett Miller, Marianne Faithfull, The Polyphonic Spree, Robyn Hitchcock, Brad Mehldau, Keane, Spoon, Dido, Of Montreal and Evan Dando, and even co-produced Kanye West’s Late Registration album in 2005. He has done many movie soundtracks (Hard Eight, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I heart Huckabees, The Break-Up, Synecdoche, New York, Step Brothers, Glago’s Guest). Even if you don’t know who he is, I bet you have heard his music.
His approach of composition is unique and instantaneously recognizable especially because of his Chamberlin keyboard, and each of his tunes seems to be a sort of fusion of familiar pop rock sounds.
And when he talks bout music, it’s fascinating:
‘This weird form, music, is as mathematical as architecture, and it’s as abstract as monkeys throwing paint at the wall’
Here, in LA, Jon Brion is playing regular shows at Largo on Friday nights where he covers famous songs or plays original ones. Multi-instrumentalist, he usually uses layered loops that he records one by one, right in front the audience, starting with drums, then bass, piano, guitar,… at least this is what he did when I saw him and it was pretty fascinating. He basically can play anything and has absorbed the pop-rock music of the last decades, as a matter of fact, who else can play a Radiohead song while imitating Tom Waits?
You can watch it here: