From club fame to major-label outcast: Inside the 20-year saga of Jon Brion’s lost album
LOS ANGELES — Jon Brion used to look through liner notes with a fear of seeing his name. Actually, the name was OK — it was the list of a dozen or more instruments that inevitably appeared next to his name that he began to dread.
“You remember the old Jerry’s Deli menu, where it was like a loose-leaf binder you got handed?” he asks, invoking the venerable Studio City eatery to illustrate how he was identified on albums like Aimee Mann’s “Whatever,” much of which he produced and on which he’s credited as playing — deep breath here — pump organ, Mellotron, Chamberlin, glockenspiel, Optigan, vibraphone, piano, harmonium, Hammond organ, Indian harmonium, Cottage organ, B-3, celeste, toy piano, tack piano, Wurlitzer and marimba. “It was a zillion variations on the same thing: How do you want your pastrami or corned beef? And you’re like, I’m here because I’m hungry and it’s 3 a.m.”
The problem was that all these exotic-sounding devices were “basically just different keyboards,” as Brion puts it, and by mentioning each of them, the artists who hired him as a session musician — one of L.A.’s most in-demand in the late 1990s and early 2000s — were “stoking an idea that I don’t believe in and certainly wasn’t intending to put out there,” which was this: Jon Brion is the Man Who Can Play Anything.
Today the characterization still makes him wince. But although he says he asked folks to streamline his contributions, Brion’s legend only continued to grow thanks to his prolific studio work with the likes of
