There’s a tragic promotional video for Ro Sham Bo—the 1994 album from The Grays, Jon Brion’s former band—on YouTube, and, oddly enough, in slightly higher quality on Apple Music. Unlike some other vaunted ‘90s bands cut from the same power pop cloth—Superdrag, Teenage Fanclub—The Grays never seemed poised to become the next big thing. (But you should probably take into consideration I was only a toddler when this record came out, so what the fuck do I know, really.) De facto bandleaders Brion and Jason Falkner had both been circling the same LA music scene drain for awhile—they both played lead guitar in Jellyfish, albeit in different lineups. (And unlike Falkner, Brion was never a touring or even “official” member of the band.)
And so this video is tragic for a couple of reasons; it’s a Big Glossy Music Biz attempt at making an uncool band seem extremely cool, which almost always backfires, especially in hindsight. It is tragic because you can tell Falkner and the other two members of the band (guitarist and songwriter Buddy Judge and drummer Dan McCarroll) are sort of buying it. Falkner in particular comes off as slightly vindictive, but not exactly unlikable—after all, Jellyfish broke up after refusing to record any of his songs for their sophomore release, and now he’s got a Brand New Band, baby. The video is a mixture of behind-the-scenes footage of the band recording the album (actually very cool!) and mimed performances, intercut with goofy B-roll and brief interviews highlighting the four members. Brion is the odd duck—it is immediately clear even from this short interview that he cares about music and doesn’t give a shit about much else, including—and maybe especially—the concept of being in a rock band; he talks about how he formed The Grays “to have fun.” To my knowledge, there’s not a whole lot of concrete information regarding The Grays’ dissolution—I remember reading a rumor that Brion was ditched by the rest of the band at a Denny’s after their final tour ended. I’ve also heard a rumor that, one time, someone requested a Falkner-penned Grays song at one of Brion’s legendary, fully-improvised Largo shows in Los Angeles and without a word (but very much in response to the request) he launched into a cover of “Holocaust” by Big Star instead. But you don’t have to be a band therapist à la Some Kind of Monster to suss out the origins of some serious internal tensions here—for Falkner, The Grays was a chance to do the band thing “the right way” after a relatively disappointing experience playing second fiddle in Jellyfish. And for Brion, The Grays were always probably viewed as a means to an end, the little rinky-dink rock band he could futz around in after a long day of recording harmonium for David Byrne or whoever.
And this is classic Jon Brion! A very serious musician of seriously intimidating talent with a whole lot of serious thoughts on music in general—and yet, as a composer, he is maddeningly self-effacing if not outright self-deprecating. His collaborations with other artists almost always have an elevating effect—whether it’s the guitar hook in “One Headlight” or the sunny vocal harmonies and twinkly keyboards he slapped onto some of Elliott Smith’s bucket hat era ballads. But his own shit is the best. As a musician, guitarist, arranger, and producer, Brion has no rival in the modern era. And as a songwriter—in the very classic, conventional, Tin Pan Alley sense—his peers are literally limited to a handful of his star collaborators: Fiona Apple, Elliott Smith, Aimee Mann.
Brion’s lone solo album Meaningless has finally been remastered, pressed to vinyl by Portland label Jealous Butcher, and thrown on streaming. Previously, Meaningless was only available on YouTube, as a low-quality rip, or in its official form as a CD that you can almost always find at Amoeba in Hollywood. (I like to think whenever one sells Brion sends one of his elves to deliver another copy—and just one. How many huge CD buys include fucking Meaningless?) I’ll try not to regurgitate anything that’s been written about this album already but it is quite simply one of the best indie pop records ever made. It is also a brutal breakup record, but not in the Rumours, Blood on the Tracks, or even Blue sense. There are few if any calculated and vengeful knife twists here—instead, imagine something like “Days” by The Kinks or Sebadoh’s “Soul and Fire” stretched into an LP’s worth of music and you have a pretty good sense of how soaked your pillow will be after that first listen.
Pop music or rock music or whatever largely perpetuates an adolescent (i.e. idealistic and quasi-sociopathic) model of romance: You fall in love and it’s almost always good for awhile, and then it probably ends, or you get lucky and you stay in love long enough to get married. Usually that doesn’t happen on the first try, so you jump around from person to person until you find that one person you click with, and then your life’s purpose has essentially come to an end and you can live out the remainder of your days feeling extremely restless and bored. Assuming you continue to date north of 25, you start to realize those fairytales have primed you for an intolerable amount of heartache and confusion, and that’s separate from the actual, warranted heartache and confusion that comes from being romantically involved with another human being. “Big moments” like first kisses and family dinners start to lose some of their luster. Plans for the future carry reverberations from the past, and so it becomes impossible to stay focused on the present. That’s if you’re truly sick, of course.
Pop music’s big promise is that love always feels the same—like a pop song, or at least, like you expect a pop song to feel. But that is not like the real world, and it’s also not like the pop music Jon Brion makes. Falling in love becomes more predictable and falling out of love is cumulative damage. The title track on Meaningless is about how the pieces of a shared world—that highway, that hotel, that car—are imbued with a specific type of meaning that we literally can’t appreciate until that love dies and the shared world falls to pieces. Falling in love again doesn’t erase or supplant those tender feelings; you just create a shared world from scratch with someone new and then fuck everything up all over again, probably.
The songs on Meaningless are torn between antithetical emotional states. Maybe that sounds dissatisfying, or maybe you are a really annoying person who thinks Jon Brion needs to go to therapy. On the contrary, I believe this is what makes Meaningless such a perennial classic and Brion such an intrepid writer. Take a song like “Same Mistakes”—what the fuck is going on here? Is it an apprehensive celebration of new love or ruthless self-recrimination? Is it a sales pitch to a prospective partner or an apology to a former one? Initially, it feels like the former—he’s telling someone new he doesn’t want to fuck up a potential relationship. But by the bone-chilling third verse, the truth is brought into focus: He’s actually addressing the person from the previous relationship, or at the very least, he’s so hung up on the previous relationship that he has no business making promises to someone new:
“I did a lot / That I could not undo.”
Obviously, who am I to judge? Meaningless is an honest depiction of love at every stage, and honesty is often confusing. If you have not felt happy, excited, anxious, protective, bitter, remorseful, tender, jealous, hyper, and depressed all at once while in love, you are either lying, naive, or Christian. John Keats wrote about something called the “negative capability,” which I only know about because my psychiatrist told me what it was. In essence, it’s the ability and willingness to pursue artistic beauty with no clear intent and without regard for the things you could end up revealing about yourself. In other words, make the thing, make excuses later. This is not how we think about songs (as in, relatively conventional pop songs with relatively literal lyrics), which is probably why songs are not taken seriously as pieces of art—we've been led to believe they are tiny, little things that can only encompass one, tiny little meaning each.
I’ll never forget listening to Meaningless with my first girlfriend in her Geo Prizm and her saying it sounded like “Elliott Smith, but gay.” That was one of the first times I realized Brion’s music isn’t for everyone. Smith’s heavy use of metaphor and legitimately funny turns of phrase have a neutralizing effect on the misery coursing through that music, I think, making it a bit more palatable to “the masses”—and his signature “whisper singing” distracts from how overtly pretty and melodic those lines are, for better or worse. By comparison, Brion’s voice is like a cross between Lennon’s nasally whine and McCartney’s razor sharp, cherubic croon, which means it is, without a doubt, a singing voice for a very particular type of person. (Probably a guy. Definitely me.) It also means there’s no hiding the Beatles influence, which is anathema to another type of person. (Probably also a guy, but not me.) But Brion’s elocution is the x factor—he recounts heartache and emotional chaos plainly and openly, which is unnerving, I guess. The Jon Brion in Meaningless is an emotional wreck; the Jon Brion narrating Meaningless is detached from himself, and in turn is “flexible and open to the world,” as Keats would say. Meaningless is one of the greatest and bravest albums about love I’ve ever heard, and I’ve accepted that most people simply don’t understand or care. Now that it’s finally on Spotify maybe they’ll at least pretend to. - Mo Troper