MO TROPER Announces New Jon Brion Covers Album 'Troper Sings Brion'

Pop savant Mo Troper announces Troper Sings Brion, a new album of Jon Brion covers out this Friday via Lame-O Records, with the release of Brion deep cut and fan-favorite, “Citgo Sign.”

A labor-intensive project of love, the album features covers of 11 Jon Brion unreleased rarities pulled from demos and live recordings and reinterpreted by Troper. “The idea was to only choose songs that Brion had never officially released: songs that make me say ‘f, I want to hear the real version of this because it's as good as anything on Meaningless,'” explains Troper, referring to Brion's beloved lone solo album from 2001, remastered and finally released on streaming last year.

Buried somewhere on YouTube is an interview with Jon Brion in which the cultishly celebrated producer, composer, and songwriter distinguishes between two types of pop music: Songs and performance pieces.

“You could play a Gershwin song in the style of Led Zeppelin and have a completely satisfying experience,” Brion explains, “but when you start playing Zeppelin songs in the style of 1920s music, suddenly it's laid bare that [Zeppelin] is about those people [together] in a room.”

It's an elegant thought experiment that fans of Brion's will likely find gratifying to hear from his mouth because it describes exactly the kind of songs that he's both made his living producing for others and spent his spare time penning himself: Songs with a combination of chords, melody, and lyrics that stand on their own; songs that could be performed in any number of styles without their potency diminished. In other words, songs worth covering.

These are also the kinds of songs that Portland, Oregon power pop maestro Mo Troper loves, which is why, when he's not busy churning out should-be classics that are as blown-out as they are Gershwin-esque, he's made a habit of recording covers. 2021's full album cover of the Beatles' Revolver is merely the most notable recent example of an interest that Troper's fans have been happy to hear him indulge since his early band Your Rival reimagined Beyonce's “Irreplaceable” as a Pinkerton outtake back in 2014. Troper is also a massive Brion fan, so it's fitting that his newest release is an extraordinary full-length record's worth of Jon Brion covers entitled, of course, Troper Sings Brion.

Though you'd be forgiven for suggesting it was inevitable, Troper Sings Brion was actually a recent idea, sprouting from conversations in early 2023 with Lame-O label head Eric Osman about a hypothetical reissue imprint. True to form, the concept was obsessive fandom and self-mythology wrapped into one: “I told Eric, ‘Hey, you should release these Jon Brion demos'—like half-seriously,” Troper jokes, “and then a few months later I was like ‘Wait, maybe I should release these Jon Brion demos.'” 

During the same period, Troper had been reading about the pre-internet fan culture surrounding SMiLE, the lost Beach Boys opus famously abandoned in 1967. “There was just this huge enthusiast community,” he says.

“Lots of underground musicians who would eventually become famous curated SMiLE newsletters and would submit their ideal sequencing and stuff. It was the first interactive album.” Eventually, Troper found an interview where another of his musical icons, Elvis Costello, admitted he considered recording his own version of SMiLE. “That to me was really inspiring,” Troper explains. “I was like ‘Maybe I should approach these Jon Brion demos like that, because no one else is going to do anything with them.'”

Most of the songs covered on Troper Sings Brion appear on a two-disc compilation of Brion's demos from 1991-1995 that was initially passed around on unofficial fan forums before winding up on YouTube. Live bootlegs of Brion abound online, but for most diehards, the demos comp is canon. And like any fan, Troper respects canon: His arrangements tend not to reinvent the wheel but rather to emphasize the best parts of the demos, pulling them out from under their opaque veneer of reverb and often gaining out the guitars in the process.

“Maybe this sounds arrogant, but I wanted to hear a version of Citgo Sign that rocks,” says Troper. If SMiLE was Brian Wilson's “teenage symphony to God,” this is Troper's adult symphony to tape saturation. 

That's not to say this approach made the recording a breeze. One trademark of Brion's “unpopular pop” is his ability to launder heady harmonic choices through hook-laden melodic earworms, and learning those unusual parts from muddy demos was anything but straightforward. “It did really test me,” Troper admits. “I feel pretty good about my ear and my ability to work out pop songs, but learning this stuff I was like ‘Oh no, this is like Django Reinhart or something.'”

Who better to introduce those songs to a wider audience than Mo Troper? He might be the only Jon Brion fan with both the audacity to attempt something like Troper Sings Brion and the studious reverence to actually pull it off. He might just be the first. Either way, for fans of the pop tradition that both Troper and Brion have mined so successfully, these 11 covers are sure to form their own canon.

Photo Credit: Hannah Clark

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