John Brion on Sound Opinions

Holy shit Greg’s blogging. So, uh, yeah. 5 months between posts. How about that. You know what it is? I get all up in arms about how everything has to be “written” so that it “makes sense” and you know “has a grand statement” or some shit. I’m done, I’m just gonna blurt and maybe there will be more stuff here as a result. It will probably be more annoying but it will also be a lot more like listening to me talk, for better and for worse.

So I noticed on the last.fm page of Spitball’s Burley Grymz that he was listening to podcasts of Sound Opinions, an NPR radio show out of Chicago featuring the rock critics from the big two newspapers - Greg Kot (Chicago Tribune) and Jim Derogatis (or “De-ro” as he is usually known, of the Chicago SunTimes.) I knew Greg Kot back in the day, I wrote some freelance capsules for him just out of college. He’s a great guy with great taste and a credit to rock crits everywhere. De-ro, well, um, he’s a character. He once played in a Wire cover band called The Ex-Lion Tamers that toured opening for Wire on The Ideal Copy tour playing Pink Flag from start to finish including the silences between songs. It all goes downhill from there.

Anyways I recently bought a new Mac Mini and seeing these podcasts got me playing around with that functionality in iTunes. So I set myself up for Sound Opinions and downloaded a few back episodes, one of which I burned to CD and listened to while cleaning my kitchen Sunday. This episode contained an interview with film composer extroardinaire Jon Brion. It’s a great show, Brion is smart and funny and obviously loves to talk about his craft. There’s an extended bit wherein he talks about the difference between performance based bands and song based bands, and how people react to them in different ways. He also discusses how he works and the trajectories his career has taken. I really recommend it, its great stuff.

At two points he takes time out to play a bit. The first one is just a song he wrote, and it’s cool, it made me curious about what a Brion solo record would sound like. Then at the end of the show he is asked to play again, and he thinks a bit and says “Well I’ll just play this little instrumental piece.” He sits at a piano and plays all of maybe five notes, and I was just frozen in my kitchen because I was instantly transported back to that moment in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind where Joel has woken up after his brain is erased, and he’s kind of bumbling around before running away after the train to Montauk. This is what he is playing, the background music from this part of the film. There’s only one other composer whose music in film has had that effect on me and his name is Bernard Herrmann. OK I’ll add John Williams too, fine. Now I’m not ready to say Jon Brion is the next Bernard Herrmann, but his talent at taking his lilting waltzes and melding them to the film in question so that the two are perfectly complementary is umistakable and worthy of the utmost praise. He’s a smart and intelligent guy too? Sign me up, I declare myself a fan.

Sound Opinions is a fun show too, and I look forward to catching up on more episodes. Kot and De-ro have a real Siskel & Ebert vibe going, with them jabbing each other’s opposing tastes and generally stirring up trouble which is perfect for a rock show. Previously the show had been two hours on WXRT, a commercial station in Chicago targeted heavily towards boomers, but I think it’s a better show slimmed down to one and NPR is a perfect fit for them.

The Mac is cool too.

Edit: I meant to put in a link to this specific show so here it is. Also I just discovered a place you can stream the first two minutes of every song from one of Brion’s solo albums, and as predicted it is pretty great. Go nuts.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 11:55 am and is filed under Movies, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.