CLASSIC SOUNDTRACK
When it comes to evoking feelings in film music, Jon Brion knows no fear. Speaking to Interview magazine, the US producer, songwriter and composer noted how some filmmakers dread the accusation of ‘leading the audience’ with music. But not Brion: ‘I think of it,’ he said, ‘as a job requirement.’
Twenty years ago, Brion proved as much for Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’s head-trip for the heart. After working for Paul Thomas Anderson on Hard Eight, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, Brion’s aptitude for emotional intricacy proved match-ready for Eternal Sunshine’s alt-symphony of bruised love. As ex-lovers plunge into memories of soured romance, Brion’s score dives, too: circling memory’s playground in smoky tendrils of keys, woodwind, guitar and reversed tape loops, his fragmented music makes bittersweet feelings tangible with exquisitely artful intelligence.
The soft-scudding waltz of Theme sets out the stall, its curiously backwards background loops suggesting a nostalgic love theme broadcast from memory’s depths. Sweetness and sorrow merge, beautifully. Collecting Things is sadder still, its wonky guitar and weeping strings evoking painful pasts with a subdued yet sumptuous old-Hollywood grandeur. Bookstore washes in on warm waves of romanticism, while Showtime takes a detour into discordance, warping the film’s main theme to suggest the journeys of self-erasure Jim Carrey’s Joel and Kate Winslet’s Clementine have undertaken.
Elsewhere, Brion captures the tingly trepidation of fresh-minted love in exquisitely dreamy fan favourite Phone Call, and the suspense of being between states in the neo-Hitchcockian A Dream upon Waking. Postcard brings woodwind-ghosted despondency and the woozy waltz of Strings That Tie to You adds doleful vocals – Brion’s own. Perhaps most famously, a sadcore, Sea Change-era Beck also takes the microphone for a cover of the Korgis’ Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime, a gorgeously foggy interpretation produced by Brion to maintain aching congruity with the score.
Songs from choral-pop outfit The Polyphonic Spree, garage-rockers The Willowz and Indian singer Lata Mangeshkar also feature, but it’s Brion’s wo
