His love for authentic instruments started when he used to buy 78 rpm records to play drums with as a youngster. He moved from drums to piano to guitar, and now he adds such instruments as vibraphones, harmoniums and Chamberlains as often as he can to an album. “They are such strong colors and when people hear a real vibraphone for the first time, as opposed to a DX-7 vibraphone patch or whatever’s on their Roland at home, the first time you actually hear the molecules dance around your head…” he pauses. “When you’re in close proximity to one of these things, it’s really exciting.”

Fiona Apple

That excitement, he adds, is the reason he collects such instruments. “If somebody has never heard a vibraphone and you play a four-mallet chord behind them when they’re singing a song, they just about jump out of their skin,” he says with a laugh. Along with the vibraphone, Brion has been enamored with an 8-string ukulele he purchased last year. “It’s a very unique sound,” he reports. “It sounds like a nylon string, 12-string guitar with a capo on the fifth fret. That’s sort of the effect and it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard. It’s instantly unique. That’s also part of what attracted me to play keyboards a decade ago, although now vintage keyboards are everywhere. My friends and I used to joke in the ’80s that come the ’90s, the DX-7 is going to be the keyboard everybody wants,” he says with a smile. “It really was the wah-wah pedal of the ’80s, just as loops are the wah-wah pedals of the ’90s.”

In addition to the eclectic truckload of instruments, Brion will generally arrive at the chosen studio (these days it’s usually either Ocean Way or NRG in Hollywood) with some mic-pre’s, a couple of his own high-end microphones, a couple of what he calls “character microphones,” as well as some old outboard effects. “Oh, I also try to arrive free of expectations,” he adds with a laugh.

Which, given the assortment of artists on his credit sheet, is almost as important as the studio or technology he chooses for a session. “The artists I’m attracted to tend to be more diverse. They tend to be people who, from song to song, are trying to do expressive things and as a whole are little more iconoclastic, are a little more individualistic, a little less ruled by genre rules,” he explains.

And that’s just fine, he says, because he doesn’t make his living solely as a producer. “The best part about not being a full-time producer is that I don’t have to fill my calendar the rest of the time,” he says. “I hear one record every two years that I think would be fun to do, so I don’t have to take five other projects in the meantime. If I was just a producer, I would have had to do the 10 or 20 things I have turned down in the past five years. I think that would have been bad. I don’t think it would have been good for the artist, even if they’re fans of mine. I would have been doing a job.”

But working with artists he appreciates makes it fun to go to work each day. “It makes the tough moments livable and it makes the successes really gratifying. So, I’m pleased with the people I’ve worked with and I’m pleased that I haven’t had to work with people who are interested in me because they heard one other record and they heard some sounds that they want to co-opt for their music.”

What drives Brion is the feeling that the best is still out there. “I’ve never been satisfied with any of the records I’ve ever done,” he says. “There are points and moments on them that I think are interesting because they are not like other things that are out there in certain spots. Yet, when you’re that intimately aware of every facet of the thing, it’s hard to see the whole.”

So that’s why he mixes his resume up with titles like sideman, producer, composer, solo artist and performer (he has a very popular weekly show at Largo in Los Angeles). “I think it’s really important that people play a lot of different roles in life,” he says. “I think if you’re just the ringleader all the time, that’s unhealthy. I think if you’re just a follower all the time, that’s unhealthy.

“I think you should mix it up. I like being ringleader in the studio for somebody else’s thing. I like going into the studio and just playing guitar and having no responsibility except playing guitar well and appropriately for the song. I like that I go out on a Friday night and suddenly, I get to be the center of activity and do whatever I want in whatever way I feel like doing it. I like that in the course of a week, I can hear lots of different types of music and play a lot of different roles in it. That’s much more fun for me than being known as a producer or a guitarist or even just an artist.”

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