Jon Brion, studio guru, master pop craftsman, and current golden boy of the L.A. music scene, might be the late-'90s answer to the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. So it makes sense that he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt when we first encounter him. Brion's in Maui, taking a well-deserved vacation that began hours after he wrapped work on the orchestral score for director Paul Thomas Anderson's soon-to-be-released epic, Magnolia. Brion's enjoying his break, but there are signs that he just wasn't made for these climes; after two weeks, he's still pale as the tropical day is long. ''I'm not much for the sun,'' he says, explaining the pallor that's known in the trade as a studio tan.
It's been a while since Brion saw the out-of-doors. The three months he spent scoring Magnolia overlapped with the final weeks of producing When the Pawn..., the just-released, critically hailed sophomore album by Anderson's girlfriend, Fiona Apple. Before those projects, there was the matter of recording his own solo album; the constant calls to work as a session musician, with a resume that ranges from Melissa Etheridge to NIN; and the taping of a VH1 pilot. The cable series would riff on the format of Brion's musical residency at the L.A. nightspot Largo, where he has performed and hosted jam sessions nearly every Friday for the past three years. At any given 1 a.m., you might find Brion trading cover songs with the likes of Michael Stipe, Rickie Lee Jones, or some mariachi musician literally yanked off the street.
For these and a hundred other reasons, Brion might be the hippest guy that music biz insiders know and no one else has heard of. An enviable career, renown or no? ''To quote Spinal Tap, I'm jealous of me,'' he agrees, looking like he can't wait to get back to the mainland and strap on a bass.
''I think it's best to play a lot of roles within the course of your life,'' says Brion, who with his baby face, dark hair, and blond streaks looks like Duran Duran's John Taylor with a moptop. ''I don't think it's good to always be subordinate, or always be in charge. Going from artist, in which you get to be a self-centered adolescent, to producer, where you have to be film director and babysitter, to session musician, where your job is to make other people as happy as possible, to film composer, where you're creative but there are intense strictures...all these things are healthy, and I think I'd be really miserable as a human being doing [just] one of them.''
Brion enjoys a rep as the quintessential muso who can, and will, play any instrument; his production jobs for Apple, Rufus Wainwright, and Aimee Mann have brought a Beatlesque spirit back to pop with sonically enchanting shifts between distorted guitars, music-hall horns, gentle piano, and trumpet blasts. But it was his penchant for collecting half-busted synthesizers that got him known in early-'90s L.A. as ''the weird keyboard guy.'' That urge dates back to growing up in New Haven, Conn., the son of a part-time singer mother and orchestra-conducter father with avant-garde, Moog-playing friends. The morning after a living-room demo, Brion's parents found their 7-year-old asleep in his pj's, headphones on, draped over a modular synth.
