There are a lot of people who spend all their time trying to do that and aren’t as good.”
It’s super sad to talk about, but I just felt like, “Oh, well, here’s a big part of your future. He started to play these things that were really insightful and individualistic but still felt influenced by his love of hip-hop and R&B and dance music. Especially after we’d spent some real, private time making music. And I don’t know if he came to me seeking approval, or just some help with some sounds or something, but I can tell you he got a lot of approval very quickly. I think he wasn’t sure if this confessional, singing, non-beat-driven stuff that he’d been working on was good or not. To his credit, he never put any claims on me. I mean, I … it wasn’t something I was itching to do. I thought that maybe I would reach out to the family or the record company. Because my feeling was, “Yeah, this stuff is as good as I remember. It could only play certain things in the library, and at some point the working tracks for a couple of the songs came up: “Good News” and “Once a Day.” It flattened me. I remember, before that call came in, being on a flight and listening to music with my phone on airplane mode. It was about three months later when I got a call from the family asking me to finish the album. I wasn’t listening through stuff or doing anything in regard to it. But the experience in the music store nudged open the door for what became an unusually intimate collaboration.Īt what point did you start thinking about the music? “He said that he wanted one because he’d seen you playing it.”Īs they got to know each other in the months that followed, during which Brion became Miller’s friend, co-conspirator and something of a mentor, he never told Miller this story.
“Well, I just sold him a Fender Telecaster,” the store owner replied. Taken aback, Brion said that indeed he had, keeping the circumstances to himself. “Have you ever met Mac Miller?” asked the owner of a music store he frequented in Los Angeles one day. But Brion said he later got wind of a larger plan at work. The younger man, whom Brion described in a recent interview as seeming nervous and a little shy, gave no indication that he wanted anything more from the interaction than stimulating conversation. I send my love and support to everyone who knew him better, because what relative little I did, I just adored.A few years ago, while visiting a friend who was trying to get sober, Jon Brion, the producer and composer known for his work with Fiona Apple, Kanye West and Paul Thomas Anderson, was introduced to a young musician who was fighting an addiction battle of his own. He made his best album and formed the band that was weeks away from becoming a breakout live sensation. You gotta know that if you weren’t familiar with Mac Miller, you were about to be, whether you would have seen him at a festival, or a friend was going to catch a show and tell everyone they knew about it (like I did.) Mac put in the work. I thought that was so endearing, especially seeing as he would go on to play one of the best sets I’d seen in a very long time. He was nervous, and honest about it with the audience. The last time I saw him, he was playing Hotel Cafe’ in Los Angeles for a crowd of 100 people. I gave him whatever guidance I thought I had the right to, having been through the press ringer in the past and wanting him to understand that none of that noise could ever really take a bite out of the music he was about to put out. He was so funny I just kind of stopped typing “LOL” back in our texts. I grabbed the nearest guitar in the room and within a couple of hours we had finished a tune that made me so incredibly happy to have a part in, not to mention we established a nice little friendship. It means we don’t need to say another word, it’s going down. I didn’t expect to play on his album the day he played some songs for me at his house, but when I heard “Small Worlds,” I gave it a short, chirpy little “yup,” which is the highest praise I can give a track. You don’t get there without a lot of work, and Mac had put the work in. That’s incredibly hard to do, to evolve and get better and more focused while your career is already underway.
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