Mo Troper Tries to Capture the Elusive Jon Brion

If you fancy yourself a music fan or a film geek, there’s really no avoiding Jon Brion. Look at the liner notes for Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars and dozens of other albums released since the early ’90s, or keep your eye on the credits for movies by Paul Thomas Anderson or Greta Gerwig, and you’ll find Brion’s name.

Or perhaps, like Portland singer-songwriter Mo Troper, you clocked the distinctive sound of Brion’s music first — a warped and warm psychedelic pop akin to visiting a carnival on a microdose of psilocybin mushrooms — when seeing some of the films he scored, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I Heart Huckabees.

“It was very much in the atmosphere in the mid-2000s,” Troper says of Brion’s music, “which is also when I was the most curious music listener. I remember being really taken with it and sort of knowing his voice. Even when listening later to Meaningless [Brion’s lone solo album from 2000], I was like, ‘Oh, I know this.’”

As he started making connections between Brion and some of the artists that he already adored like Elliott Smith and Jellyfish, Troper became an instant and fervent fan. He dug deeper into Meaningless and Ro Sham Bo, the only album released by The Grays, a short-lived L.A. power pop group featuring Brion and Jason Falkner. Before too long, Troper got into the hard stuff, uncovering demo tracks and bootlegs of Brion’s legendary monthly gigs at L.A. nightclub Largo at the Coronet.

Fast-forward the tape to earlier this year. By this point, Troper has become a musical force of his own, releasing a wealth of heartfelt power-pop and garage rock tunes through tiny independent labels like Tender Loving Empire and Lame-O. During a tour of California with his friends Slaughter Beach, Dog, Troper learned that Eric Osman, owner of Lame-O Records, was considering starting a new imprint to reissue some favorite albums a la Numero Group. Troper’s suggestion was officially releasing a much-traded two-disc collection of demos that Jon Brion recorded in the early ’90s.

While nothing came of the casual chat he had with Osman, Troper continued to chew on the idea, even considering releasing it himself. Then he recalled an article about the cult-like fanbase that had grown around the Beach Boys’ magnum opus SMiLE in which Elvis Costello let slip that he considered recording his own version of that unfinished album. “I was like, ‘Wait, what if I did a covers record of the Brion demos and we put that out?” Troper remembers. “[Osman] called me and was really excited and said, ‘You should absolutely do this.’”

Within eight months or so, Troper had recorded 11 of his favorite Brion compositions, almost none of which have been officially released. Working on his own at the Trash Treasury, his homebase studio in Portland, he became something of an analyst, pulling apart the threads of each song to either faithfully recreate them or write new arrangements where there were none. The finished album, Troper Sings Brion, has a perfectly rough-and-ready energy akin to Troper’s solo work while maintaining Brion’s arch melodicism.

Recording Troper Sings Brion alone was a task befitting the artist that Troper was paying tribute to. At nearly all of Brion’s Largo gigs, and the few that he has undertaken outside of L.A., he does everything himself: laying down a drum beat that he’ll loop using an effects pedal and then building the song in layers with piano and guitar parts. While Troper didn’t go to those extremes, he opted to do it all himself, he says, “because I feel like there would be limited interest. In some ways it felt harder to get a band around a covers record. Having access to the studio, where everything was set up and ready to go, I felt like this would get made quicker if I just did it.”

The only other minor hurdle that Troper and Osman had to leap over was getting Brion’s okay to pursue this project. Not an easy task as, legend has it, that Brion doesn’t use email and doesn’t have a cellular phone of any kind. Osman instead had to track down Mark Flanagan, the man who has been in charge of Largo since 1992 and, according to Troper, serves as Brion’s manager.

“I don’t know exactly what their conversation was like,” says Troper, “but I basically know that Eric did get permission and they talked about it to some extent. That’s all I want to know. I don’t want to know how up the ladder it went.”

Whatever the case, once Osman did get the okay, Troper says that it inspired him to go back into the studio and re-record some parts and tighten elements of the album up. “I was like, ‘Now that this is kind of close enough to being in his orbit, I don’t want to make a fool.”

What Troper doesn’t seem too terribly concerned about is whether or not Brion will hear this album. Rewind a few years to 2016 in the months following the darkest U.S. election in recent history. Troper was living in L.A. at the time and decided, at long last, to make a pilgrimage to Largo to see Brion perform. He wound up going twice. The first time, he remembers, was right after Election Day and, for that show, Brion opened with a cover of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and went through a set of “the hits”: songs from Meaningless and Ro Sham Bo and tunes familiar to his many fans.

The next time around, Troper remembers, “was more improvisational. There wasn’t so much like ‘[Big Star’s] “Thirteen” in the style of Björk’ or the kinds of games he plays. He was locked into something that was the complete opposite of exhibitionism. It was like watching somebody from behind the glass. He’s just working and doesn’t even know or care that you’re there. He’s so mysterious and elusive. That thing of, ‘Damn, this guy is everywhere,’ and yet he has always been inaccessible.”