Mo Troper announces Troper Sings Brion, a new album of Jon Brion covers out this Friday via Lame-O Records. along with the news, Troper has shared a visualizer for “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 ‘Fuck, 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.

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.

Mo Troper
Troper Sings Brion
LAME-O Records
Traclisting

1. Heart of Dysfunction
2. Atlantic
3. Pray For Rain
4. Citgo Sign
5. Through With You
6. Love of My Life (So Far)
7. Any Other Way
8. Not Ready Yet
9. Stop the World
10. No One Can Hurt Me
11. I’ll Take You Anyway

Pre-order Troper Sings Brion HERE