“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.”
Troper Sings Brion teems with ambivalence, whether it’s toward the recording industry or a romantic relationship. (After enough listens, the two subjects start to blur.) The phenomenal “Love of My Life (So Far)” is another track that Troper arranged based on an old bootleg. He transforms it as uptempo, intricate power-pop without a single seam showing. He applies his trademark vocal varispeed until he’s dancing on the ceiling, luxuriating in Brion’s lyrical switchbacks and internal rhyme. “Love is great when there's no restraint/And it's not for the faint of heart,” he sighs. It’s followed by “Any Other Way,” a buzzy recessional about the embrace of suffering. “When it's words that I hope for/You've got nothing to say,” Troper sings, doodling little Brian May-style figures, “And I wouldn't have it any other way.” He sounds like he’s on a parade float.
It’s not the kind of pose Troper typically hits. On 2022’s MTV, he jammed his power-pop formalism into an overloaded circuit, resulting in a blown-out bedroom-indie record that veered from aching intimacy to prickly distance: Nilsson and Newman, fighting over the steering wheel. But Brion’s compositions permit Troper some patience. And in return, he brings an immediacy to these decades-old songs. Not that this bargain always pays off. The dour “Not Ready Yet” was a slog when Eels first recorded it for 1996’s Beautiful Freak (which Brion co-produced). Troper’s seven-minute version—still shorter and less splenetic than Brion’s demo—ends up stuck in the same tar pit as its predecessors. And while the torch song “Through With You” has its charms (particularly the hesitant piano, like he’s sight-reading the chords), the bridge—which ends on the line “I hear you don’t like men”—feels like a transplant from a darker character study.
But elsewhere, that patience is rewarded. “Stop the World” replaces the demo’s New Age electric piano with acoustic guitar, transplanting Brion’s gorgeous topline into a campfire ballad that could be a Figure 8 B-side. Troper’s version of “No One Can Hurt Me,” originally released in 1994 by Brion’s short-lived band the Grays, takes Brion’s psychedelic guitar motif as license for power balladry, tracking a dual-guitar solo that rocks sincerely. It’s these excursions that make his returns to home base—the lovestruck jangle-pop of “Citgo Sign,” the glee-club Beach Boys homage “Pray for Rain”—that much richer. Just like Brion, the prolific Troper knows the joy of starting a new song. But finishing some is pretty great, too.
