In the final analysis, though, some of his best work has been working as a record producer. In addition to Apple’s When The Pawn... release, he’s put his stamp on Robyn Hitchcock’s latest, Rufus Wainwright’s self-titled debut, eels’ Beautiful Freak and a number of Aimee Mann albums.

Photo:Creston Funk

Though it’s clear he knows what it takes to live up to the title, he points out that defining a producer’s responsibility these days is difficult, at best. “We live in an age of serious misconception, in my opinion, of the job of the producer,” he suggests. “Since the time of Phil Spector and the sort of crazed autocrat as one type of producer, to the image of producer as multi-instrumentalist and arranger in the late ’70s, then it was multi-instrumentalist/arranger/engineer, and then in the late ’90s it was multi-instrumentalist/arranger/engineer/co-owner of record label. Personally, the job requires different things all the time.”

The first part of the job, he explains, is to help the artists uncover what they’d like to represent on an album. And truth be known, he’d love to be in the position John Hammond found himself in when Bob Dylan joined him in the studio to record the seminal LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, but he knows he gets called for a very specific reason: “I get hired to be the guy with a giant truck-full of instruments and because I’ve made other records they’ve heard that don’t sound like the bulk of other records out there. So, I get hired to be the crazed, eclectic co-conspirator. That’s true on every record I’ve ever produced; there is not an exception.”

There have been those times, though, when he’s had a chance to sit back and enjoy the show. “It’s been really fun for me on certain records when I’ve had the budget to hire a band and not have to play,” he recalls, “to just be around and enjoy the experience and spend time with the engineer and making sure the room feels cool. That’s just a gas. I’ve had a few great experiences with that.”

One of the most recent examples of just that is his work on the Magnolia original motion picture score. After composing the 90-minute score (it’s a three-hour film), he had a chance to sit in the Todd A/O control room and just listen to the orchestra—he opted not to conduct so he could watch the film at the same time and check his work.

After a year of producing pop albums and recording his solo debut, Meaningless, Brion saw no reason not to do a soundtrack. “I do them for the same reason I do anything, because it was interesting to me,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to work with a whole orchestra, and it was the first opportunity where somebody was laying that opportunity in front of me. I couldn’t help myself.”

In fact, the soundtrack work wasn’t much different from the pop work. “I found that it’s all the same stuff you’re normally dealing with—melody, harmony, counterpoint,” he explains. “As a producer, I think in orchestral terms anyway, so what I learned from this is something I already knew, which is that I wish I could use orchestras on records all the time, but it’s simply too expensive. It is amazing all the stuff you spend time on when you’re making the record to give it depth. You place things in different parts of the room acoustically and use multiple performers to interact with each other and get a layered effect, but the voice is still the most important thing. Of course, with the orchestra it’s right there and it’s coming out of them like that all the time.”

Call the Magnolia soundtrack a sidelight because Brion has already jumped back in the studio where it’s just him and the artist talking about the songs they’ll record. In Brion’s world, there is no pre-production, and he’ll only play the songs one time with the artist before they roll tape. That casual attitude continues each day that they work together. “I ask, ‘Which one do you feel like playing? Is there anything you’d like me to know ahead of time?’ Then I start throwing different things on,” he explains. There are one to three passes at that type of experimentation, and then Brion will turn to a handful of tried and true studio techniques to find the right sound.

And though he has purchased a Pro Tools setup—mostly to record the songs for Meaningless (which is only offered at Artist Direct’s Web site), he still prefers to use real instruments and complete takes. “In a perfect world, I’d like every performance to be uninterrupted so you get all of the subconscious information that comes out, which is an undeniable thing. But you don’t always have the option,” he concedes.

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Reprinted with permission from Magazine, September, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved