Jon Brion

Sad Waltzes, Empathic Embrace and Anxious Fits

published in The Wire No.512, 2026, London

Excerpt

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Brion’s music is key in distinguishing Punch-Drunk Love from early 2000’s Rom Com saturation. His arrangements are subtly saccharine, influenced by the lush strings found in rock and pop ballads circa 1970s, arranged by Van Dyke Parks, Jack Nitzsche and Paul Buckmaster. Their sonority affectionately referenced the Easy Listening sparkle of 1950/1960s hi-fi arrangements by Nelson Riddle and Les Baxter, through to Percy Faith and Paul Mauriat. Brion’s encyclopaedic embrace of recorded popular music is felt in his distinctive melodic sensibility: a trans-Atlantic nexus of solo-Beatles songcraft and Laurel Canyon recording. To be clear, the recording studio rules here, not the concert hall. Punch-Drunk Love used vintage microphones for many of its sessions. The film score brims with detail, space and clarity.

Following Punch-Drunk Love, non-mainstream cinema forged a strange meld of nerdy empathy, hipster cynicism with feminist fragility in ‘relationship dramedies’: David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (2004); Charlie Kaufman’s The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Synecdoche, New York (2008); Miranda July’s The Future (2011); Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 (2012) and Trainwreck (2015); and Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird (2017). These films cannily merged po-faced ridicule with heartfelt feeling, to varying degrees of success. Yet in all these titles, Brion’s music fortifies their narratives with an endearing romantic sensibility earned by their dysfunctional, antisocial and ‘spectrum’ characters. His Canyon-esque saunter and rich instrumental layering ameliorates any dismissive urges the films’ characters elicit.

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Text © Philip Brophy 2026. Image © Paramount.