Jon Brion: Sad Waltzes, Empathic Embrace and Anxious Fits

In this latest instalment of the Secret History of Film Music, Philip Brophy considers how Jon Brion’s music engenders sympathy for the flawed characters in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025) and Punch-Drunk Love (2002), and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017).

As discussed in the previous essay in this series, Jonny Greenwood provides an amazing score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025). But two pieces by an earlier composer of Anderson’s films bookend the movie: Jon Brion’s “Bunker Bumper” and “Global Bully”.

In One Battle After Another, they function as quietly majestic statements of the drive and exhaustion which propel the intergenerational tale of social reparation and familial separation. “Bunker Bumper” uncoils as a disjointed bossa nova: a gently struck bass drum marks time for the snare, hi-hats and cymbals, skipping with a detached, dainty air. Horns and strings entwine like a billowing flag in slow motion. Sometimes the horns are silenced as the strings climb high, as if they’re searching for something. The music feels absent of harmonic progression; it simply surges, even struggles ahead. It plays near the opening as Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and their radical group French 75 attack a border internment camp. The music intones a sad, fatalistic comment on the limited impact of such revolutionary zeal despite the commitment of its participants.

The second track “Global Bully” plays at the film’s end. Years later, Pat relaxes at home with his young adult daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), offspring of Pat and the long absent Perfidia. The domestic scene shows Willa reading a letter from her mother. In a voiceover, Perfidia acknowledges her mistake in deserting Willa, and expresses hope they will one day meet again. Over a lilting percussive pattern, more strings and horns are orchestrated, but here they coalesce around a chordal pattern. The drums call to mind the tinklers of North American tribal shell shakers engaged in ceremonial dances; the orchestra feels like a calming eulogy played at a church service. The piece acquiesces to how the feisty past can dissolve into a depleted present. It concludes with a touching embrace between Pat and Willa.

To label the placement of “Global Bully” here as mere closure misses the weight and precision that Brion’s music bestows on the scene. Across Anderson’s first four films, Brion developed a unique modus operandi of embedding music into movies which, arguably, redefined standard operations of ‘scoring’ and ‘accompaniment’.

These two Brion tracks in One Battle After Another were recorded and produced 23 years earlier, for Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002). That film’s sessions saw Brion continually feeding Anderson with ideas, sketches, recordings and even multitrack breakdowns. All were offered not as thorny strictures, but as flexible flotsam to be experimented with, in terms of how their sono-musical character could enhance and shape onscreen characters. How apt that some of these unused tracks surfaced decades later. As Brion has said: “There are lots of [film composers] doing great things, but it comes down to the director’s ‘follow-through’.”

A small suite of prepared piano and percussion ensemble pieces makes up a sizable part of the Punch-Drunk Love score. They sound jittery and clackety, like a wooden digestive system attempting to process parts of a drum kit. They initially read as sound effects more than music – a perceptual doubting, enabled by Gary Rydstrom’s deft mix which folds Brion’s trap kit into Christopher Scarabosio’s sound design (who has handled every Paul Thomas Anderson film since). “Le Petit Chateau” and “Hands And Feet” were based on micro-cassette recordings Brion made of Anderson verbally articulating his ideas for rhythms he wanted to use as timing devices for the film’s long tracking shots. The voice of Anderson became the hands of Brion which became the limbs of Barry (Adam Sandler) who discombobulates throughout the movie in arabesques of anxiety.

Upon its release, many assumed the film to be a comedy, thanks to Sandler, but the point was there for an attuned audience: mentally unstable people often appear ‘ridiculous’, but to laugh at their pained performance is inhumane, not to mention imperceptive.

Brion’s music plays two roles here. The first, through its percussive moments, is to sonorise the synaptic hell of Barry’s panic attacks, and how desperately out of sync he is with his own body and those around him. The second lies in the sumptuous waltzes (“Punch-Drunk Melody”, “Third Floor Hallway”, “Blossoms & Blood”) which spread the wondrous hope Barry glimpses when he falls in love with Lena (Emily Watson). Irrespective of cliche, the luscious orchestral arrangements welcome the couple into a better, dreamier world.

Brion’s music is key in distinguishing Punch-Drunk Love from early 2000s romcom saturation. His arrangements are subtly saccharine, influenced by the lush strings found in rock and pop ballads circa the 1970s, arranged by Van Dyke Parks, Jack Nitzsche and Paul Buckmaster. Their sonority affectionately referenced the easy listening sparkle of 1950/60s 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 transatlantic 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 and feminist angles in ‘relationship dramedies’: David O Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (2004); Charlie Kaufman’s 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 Lady Bird (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.

In Lady Bird, the titular lead (Saoirse Ronan) feels intentionally unlikeable. Equally deliberate is how Brion’s score waltzes around Lady Bird’s teen sense of independence. The film concludes with Lady Bird finally on her own, enrolled in a New York college. At a public phone, she leaves a message for her mother, admitting the rupturing effects of her teen angst created a wedge between them.

Brion performs the resonant piano theme like a silent movie accompanist: trilling high notes and copying what’s happening on screen while allowing it space. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind features similar piano themes played over scenes with onscreen dialogue mixed low. This isn’t simply a formal sonic device: it displaces the viewer/auditor from the psychic space of the story – where you identify or read what’s happening to characters on screen – and relocates you within the characters’ headspace. Positioned this way, the audience can feel a touch exposed, implicated in being present when characters are at their most vulnerable. “Global Bully” fades up in One Battle After Another as we see Lockjaw (Sean Penn) gassed and hear Pat prepare Willa for Perfidia’s letter: death and life fused through emotive exhalation.

That seems to be a throughline in the work Brion has provided across the film and music industries. In discussions with Anderson, Brion noted the aim of Punch-Drunk Love was to “feel like a musical, but nobody ever breaks into song”. Brion’s music – and his tremulous voice which has appeared in songs in many of the films mentioned – is similarly shaped by repression, tension and elation, in a fountain of emotional surges.

Musical theatre sceptics mostly react against the unbridled emotionalism of onscreen characters liberated from their realistic surroundings. Yet this transcendental effect functions perfectly in recorded songs and popular music in general, generating one of music’s prime private pleasures. Brion and his collaborators have long embraced how song sonics skilfully embedded in the production of a film score can be exhilaratingly transgressive.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy’s original Secret History of Film Music columns from the 1990s online in the digital archive. It was revived in 2025 as an online column: previous instalments published on The Wire website can be read here. Wire readers and print and digital subscribers can also find this essay on page 16 of The Wire 512.