If you’re a prodigious reader of liner notes, you’ve probably seen Jon Brion’s name somewhere over the last 30 years. Brion garnered attention among the blossoming ’90s singer-songwriter set as a producer, session player, and finisher, a guy who shows up with dozens of instruments to flesh out arrangements and help your ailing studio album make the deadline. The atmospheric slide guitar in the Wallflowers’ “One Headlight,” the delicate Chamberlin keyboard notes in Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” and Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up,” and the elegant vibraphone part in Elliott Smith’s “Waltz #1” were all played by Brion. A lively partnership with director Paul Thomas Anderson would lead to additional gigs as a film composer, while work in the aughts with Michel Gondry netted a job co-producing alongside Ye. But it was scoring films — he composed music for Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, Hard Eight, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — that kept the boat afloat in the crunch of the late ’90s when mergers and evolving tastes led to wavering support at major labels for critically acclaimed acts. Mann would leave Geffen Records following an Academy Award nomination for her Magnolia soundtrack single “Save Me,” feeling like she was being pressed to write hits. A few years later, Apple discovered that Epic wasn’t very excited about the songs she and Brion had been working on for her third album, Extraordinary Machine, a tiff that spilled out into the news as fans pressured the label in support of the singer-songwriter. (Early mixes leaked, and the album was rerecorded, leaving much of Brion’s work, barring the exquisite first and last songs, on the cutting-room floor in the process.)
In 1999, Brion reached out to then–Atlantic Records subsidiary Lava Records (whose catalogue of successful hits included Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed a Girl,” Sugar Ray’s “Fly,” and Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be”) about making an album that captured the collaborative spirit of his virtuosic, unpredictable L.A.-area live shows, initiating a frustrating cycle of delivering music Lava didn’t think it could market. Like Aimee Mann’s 2000 album Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo, the one her label rebuffed, Brion’s Meaningless is a meditation on interpersonal frustrations that feels tethered to the label drama happening around it. Getting lost in the languid arrangements of the wounded “Hook, Line, and Sinker” and the jittery angst of “I Believe She’s Lying” — stewing in the venom of “Ruin My Day,” “Walking Through Walls,” or the Elliott Smith–approved “Trouble” — you suspect Meaningless’s moodiness is partly the result of a nagging recording process. (Brion self-released the album in 2001 and never made another solo project.) With Meaningless finally getting an official release next Friday, I rang up the singer-songwriter, producer, and composer to walk through the disconcerting velocity of those years when great records like Meaningless could get lost in record-label hell and to solve curiosities we didn’t cover in our 2020 discussion about his work on Mac Miller’s Swimming and Circles. We traced Brion’s career and catalogue from Aimee Mann’s early ’90s hits to abortive plans for albums with Elliott Smith and Fiona Apple, appearances on rap records via arrangements and samples, and sessions with Frank Ocean.
What got you thinking about Meaningless this year?
Don’t blame me. Blame Bobb Bruno from Best Coast, who I love. He knew the fellow who ran Jealous Butcher Records and recommended him to me, said, “You can trust him,” the way musician friends talk to each other. It wasn’t something I was instigating. I didn’t mind the idea of re-releasing it because I did want to do some remastering if it ever did come out. It barely came out in the first place. The first five songs have some low end on them now. To a musician, it’s things like that that matter. Like, it doesn’t sound entirely like an AM radio.
What informed the sound of that record? The mood is melancholy, but the music is going strange places. “I Believe She’s Lying” sounds like drum and bass and klezmer music at the same time.
I should learn how to tell the short version of this story. I got signed in the mid-’90s and already, by that point, had produced a few records. I ended up, on those first records, playing a lot of instruments. I had a period of playing as a session musician. People discovered that if they were stuck on a song and didn’t know what to do, I’d come by and this cartage truck would dump off a collection of bizarre instruments and I’d put 20 things down so they’d have a lot of choices. They ended up keeping everything. And people liked listing every last corkscrew used as a percussion instrument on the record. I just hated it. That’s actually an important story about how this record started. I wanted to play acoustic guitar and sing, maybe play a bit of piano and do an overdub now and then if needed, but concentrate on that. I got my favorite musicians in town to come in. I built a studio in the basement of the house I was living in. I had Jim Keltner and Greg Lee Benmont Tench and Matt Chamberlain by, great people. At the same time, I was doing these very left-field improvisational shows every week in Los Angeles. I felt I wanted to do something very focused and not produced, not play a zillion instruments, not do any of that. But the record company hated it. One song survived with a lot of overdubs added. “Trouble.” They literally told us to stop working. I did for a little while. I went back to other people I was producing. I think I was making the second Fiona Apple record at the time.
A few months go by and they go, “Why haven’t we heard anything?” I might’ve literally laughed. You told me and the guy I was working with to stop working. Now you want to hear more. What was your problem with the first batch? The only thing I could glean from it was they didn’t think it had enough energy. It was the classic ’90s record company: We don’t hear an obvious single. Which is fine. They could’ve said that. I was a professional record producer. You hear it all day long. I took a few weeks, put some songs together, sent them. I didn’t hear back for a few weeks, rarely a good sign. Eventually, I think I called and said, “Was that better?” The only answer I got is, “Yeah, it’s a bit better.” So I did some producing and sessions and, two or three months later, they called: “Why haven’t we heard anything?” I sent in another five, six songs. At this point, I’ve sent over two albums’ worth. Same response. “Tepid” would be too much credit. I was finishing Fiona’s record and I get a call. Out of exasperation, they said, “Make something you like and we’ll put it out.” Great sense of encouragement. I did say, “I’ve been sending you things I liked.” “Well, just hand it in.” I would make these rough mixes to send them. I picked five rough mixes. Again, exasperation. They’re just rough mixes I did very quickly to send to the record company. I went, “Okay, there’s the first half of the record.” For the second half of the record, I thought I’d finish off some of the other things lying around that I like. Put them on side two, where none of them are in danger of being singles. Record companies, in those days, didn’t care. I finished off the rest of the record in ten days. Two were recorded from scratch: “Hook, Line, and Sinker” and “Same Mistakes.”
So your label is being wishy-washy at the same time Geffen doesn’t want the Bachelor record Aimee Mann is making …
Oh, all this shit was going on at the same time, yeah. Aimee was getting kicked around different labels.
Did you just feel disillusioned with the whole system? It felt like there was a new kind of pop music happening, but the people who were in positions of power didn’t necessarily understand the artists they’d signed.
It wasn’t a good moment. The very early ’90s were good. Nirvana hit, and business people went, People seem to like this weird, different stuff. In short order, of course, they did the standard thing. They signed anything that sounded remotely like Nirvana or came from the same place or sounded like all the stuff that they’d hear on college radio. The early good electronic-music stuff at that moment was getting signed. Björk makes her first record. So there are these things that break through, and there’s this great hopefulness at the beginning of the ’90s. Hip-hop takes this turn, and Dr. Dre hits his stride, and great shit starts happening. But by the mid-’90s, a malaise kicks in of copies of all of that stuff, some of which is becoming hugely popular. It takes the turn where successful records can suddenly sell 10 million copies. I talked to record business people who had very successful artists at the time selling 2 million records. The attitude was, How’d we only sell two million? This record should’ve sold 10 million.
I was around for a lot of those conversations. It was bizarre. Aimee changed labels I don’t know how many times. It was something extraordinary. Did that affect me? Absolutely. I happily had an improvisational gig where I could do whatever I wanted, and there was no expectation other than there being interesting stuff going on and a good feeling in the room. I could collaborate. I had things to produce for people who had deals where there was enough budget that we could actually spend a little bit of time together and have the things we needed. So that was lovely. But did a lot of the people I liked actually feel like they had a chance of getting through? Not necessarily. It doesn’t mean you don’t try. In Aimee’s case, Paul Thomas Anderson peppered his movie with stuff that had changed hands between, really, more than one record company. She would get signed, and it’d be a six-month process where it turned out the A&R who signed her didn’t have enough power and couldn’t get okayed by the brass. There was one case I know where they really liked her and really liked the record, but they already had another female artist on the label. They chose somebody that had hits, and so in their minds, they made fine decisions, but Aimee was left in the dust for that reason. You could have a hundred fucking shitty, faceless rock bands fronted by guys. To their credit, the label inside of Atlantic that I was on had a shit ton of hits at the time. They knew what they were trying to promote to the world and what was working.
I feel like the trajectory of the Fiona Apple albums is this big escape from the pop sound of the first few. The label pushes too hard for hits the third time around, and after that, she wants out of that machine, right?
For a lot of us, you can’t blame us for wanting to get out of the situation. Something about the initial records connected with the public in a good way. That’s fantastic. And the great thing about the ’90s is there are a lot of cases where that happened. A lot of people who the world at large maybe wouldn’t have thought would be internationally beloved got through. So I actually really liked the era for that, but it could be a slog. A lot of us in that circle were accused of making anti-commercial “artsy” music, and I think all of us are actually extremely direct and not trying to be weird. As a producer and even with movies it’s like, You’re the artsy guy. There’s nothing left field here. It just maybe doesn’t sound like what’s currently being done by other people.
There are through-lines to ’60s pop and classical music, art that brought people together, in your work, but the “unpopular pop” thing stuck.
Turned out to be true. I like a lot of unpopular pop music. The funny thing about that is often it just takes time for people to see it clearly, and not because it was radical at its time, not that old artistic-myth thing. Just for whatever reason, it wasn’t going to be an easy success, but that didn’t mean it was really left field.
So a sound that’s a hard sell in the late ’90s is, by the 2000s, trickling into hip-hop. Your Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind score was sampled by the rapper Jay Electronica.
Yeah, I loved that. I thought it was quite cool.
And Kanye came around. Now, you’re in rooms with Frank Ocean and Beyoncé. You’ve worked on some pretty successful records after being told your album didn’t have hits.
That’s just been my circumstance. I don’t necessarily mind that. I get annoyed if people think, in any part of the process, that something is too left field or there’s some conscious attempt to try to be unpopular. That’s really not the case. I actually just like a ton of different music. I like a ton of rather forward-thinking stuff and also a lot of stuff that’s really old-fashioned. I love so much non-rock music and experimental music — and classical music from the very beginning of the 20th century. I’m a Billie Holiday obsessive. So all that stuff is quite dear to me. I love hip-hop. It’s other people’s hang-ups that would make that a surprise to them.
You worked on Beyoncé’s Lemonade. You put strings on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” the song where one of the biggest pop stars on the planet is threatening to leave her husband. Is it trippy keeping that secret?
The Beyoncé thing was just fun. Bowie was the first person to figure out that setting up a record the way record companies thought of it at the time sucked and to just not tell anybody he’s working on a record — just drop the complete thing on the world. Beyoncé is one of the people big enough to do it. I was psyched to take part and know about it. It wasn’t hard to be private about because, for the most part, when you’re working on a record, most people don’t know what stuff sounds like or even that certain people are working together. That’s my normal work life. It’s a private world to start with, and I like that. Some of it’s really easy. Some of it’s incredibly boring if you could watch it — the slowest, dumbest shit in the world, but it’s mostly private. Think about how most artists start. It’s a private thing in their bedrooms. In the old days, they’d sing to a tiny tape machine, and now, it’s the laptop or the phone, and it expands out from there.
I’m curious: You worked on Hard Eight and Magnolia with Paul Thomas Anderson. By the time Punch-Drunk Love comes along, it seems like you have an incredible understanding of each other’s art. Fifteen years later, we’re still waiting for a new PTA and Jon Brion project.
There may be one. We’ve done a few things. We did live-theater-y things around town. He’s got a great thing going with Jonny Greenwood. I don’t see an issue with that as long as good work is getting done. I’m not an unsatisfied fan. Everybody’s working. Also, artists aren’t, for the most part, supposed to be monogamous. There are cases where it works real well, some permanent collaboration, but the actual nature of collaboration is that there should be change. There’s one thing we’ve talked about that would be for a future film. So one never knows.
You were around for Frank Ocean’s Blonde album. What’s a Frank Ocean session like?
The most amazing thing about being in the room with Frank Ocean is that at some point he’ll sing an idea to you. You’re sitting at a keyboard or something, and the guy just starts singing, and the molecules in your body move differently. And it’s like, My God, just do that. One day, I hand him a handheld mic to show him a device that normally would be used to record a guitar. I said, “Just sing into it because it’s going to do this other stuff.” He just starts singing and improvising. What he was interested in at the time was studio experimenting. He’d do one take of vocals and he kept having different people try different things. I’d hear him singing and go, “The thing you just did three seconds ago, just do that and we’ll all fucking melt.”
Did you have anything to do with that bit of Elliott Smith’s “A Fond Farewell” that Frank sings on “Seigfried”?
Nothing at all.
Totally his idea?
Yeah.
I always wished we got more recordings of you and Elliott Smith. What happened there?
The long and short of it is when we met, he wanted that to happen. He wanted me to produce him, but he had made an agreement to get his previous album finished to use friends’ studios and, if he got a proper deal, work with them. He honored that, which is great. I’m a fan of the work. I was just happy that we were friends and we were sharing ideas, and I went over and played on things. By the time he had come around to actually work with me, he’d taken a horrendous turn in his own life and was not really capable of working in any consistent way. It was all very cliché and very heartbreaking. At the point when we were going to work together, he was randomly capable. He’s absolutely one of the best songwriters in the last 30, 40 years.
You’ve gotten to work around people who are respected for honest, melancholy music: Mac Miller, Elliott Smith, and I’d also say Fiona Apple. How do you feel about people who see them as dark or difficult?
You’re talking about three people who are really funny and hyperintelligent. We spent a lot of time together laughing. Genuine sweethearts. That doesn’t mean one doesn’t hurt or one doesn’t feel uncomfortable. People relate to them because most of us feel the same way, to a certain extent. I can tell you that some pain causes you to do work. People get their hearts broken and write some songs or paint a bunch or get really angry. Those emotions tend to get work done but only because there’s something that needs a release that has no other place to do it. When you don’t have an outlet for a large emotion in you, what the fuck are you going to do but write or make a song or throw some paint around?
Then people who only hear the venting about bad feelings think that’s the whole person.
It depends. Sometimes you’re working with somebody and they’ve written a really tough batch of stuff, and writing was their therapy. They’re in a better place by the time you’re working with them, and you’d be surprised how jovial the environment can be. It’s not like what you’d see in the movies, these horrible musician biopics. This is the dark period. And you go into the studio and it’s all tears and candles and having a séance, and people usher the artist away from the microphone in an inconsolable state, like the end of a James Brown show. More often, it’s going to be, Fuck, what should we have for dinner? And it takes an hour to figure that out. That’s closer to the truth than any of these movies will ever get. Now, the thing that happened to the person that made them write the song, that communicates a feeling to you, that’s the movie of their life. The act of writing about it is the therapy session and the private cry.
In retrospect, do you think your work on Extraordinary Machine getting scrapped served the finished product?
I love Fiona and everything she does. That became endlessly complicated. That was a situation where all the label really said was that they didn’t hear a single, but it got described as the most intentionally left-field, avant-garde thing that had ever been presented to them. I’ve been approached about the original version coming out. I need all the correct components. And I actually think it was very good work. As far as the things that have come out, sometimes a musician I know says, “I’ve listened to all the versions,” and I have to say, “That’s not possible.” The stuff that leaked isn’t finished. It isn’t a proper representation. I think it was rough mixes I made after different experiments with woodwind sections and things. All the parts were on there at once so I could study. I only made the mixes because the record company insisted on hearing something. What came out isn’t the thing. Somebody else mixed their own version and chose random things to keep off or on. There are multiple versions of the supposed first version, none of which is reflective of what was there or the quality of it, in my opinion.
As mythical as that one got, it’s really common. I’d say only about a third of the stuff I work on actually gets to come out. On a lot of things people put my name on as producer, I didn’t even know they were going to do that. Half the time, it’s stuff where people came by for a little while, and I worked on stuff and got it sounding better, and then they went and overcooked things for a year, and then it got sent to some professional mixer who replaces the sounds with all their stock sounds they use because they have hits. I’m not a fan of the sound of a lot of the popular music mixing over the last decade. I don’t want to get too technical, but it’s too overcompressed. It’s all a certain area of high end that’s very hyped, and it all sounds very, very similar. The drums all sound the same. The vocals all sound the same. These are two places where there can be a lot of uniqueness. I think the record Billie Eilish and her brother made, that first record, stands out. There are things that actually sound different. And she is incredibly humane and smart. She has the gift. It’s not surprising that she did well, but they’re not doing all the things I think any proper record company or producer, whatever, would think is the way you go about having success.
A streaming audience isn’t necessarily getting the best sound quality in the first place.
Oh God, no. But that’ll change. Every time the companies want to sell us something — phones and computers and speakers — they’ll up the resolution. That’ll be one more selling point. We’ve had ways of making digital audio sound great for 20 years. Neil Young put his ass on the line trying to help, and the record companies and Steve Jobs of the world had no interest in higher resolution. People being able to have more apps was more the important selling point. Record companies don’t care as long as they resell catalogues.
