February 22nd, 2024
Portland musician Mo Troper‘s latest album, Troper Sings Brion, is more than just a tribute album. The songs chosen are demos John Brion never officially released. It may be an album of covers but Troper’s gleaming power-pop shines through on every song. Troper chose to only cover demos as a way for other Brion devotees to hear them in a new fully fleshed out way.
Troper Sings Brion follows the 2022 release of his fifth full length MTV. Arriving hot on the heels of his 2021 full-length, Dilettante, the album finds the power pop extraordinaire diving further into home-recorded immediacy to make a record that feels like a strikingly direct conduit to the world of Mo – where heartbreak, hilarity, and hooks all go hand-in-hand.
We caught up with Mo Troper at our NYC store for our newest session of Shoplifting. An invitation to roam the racks in pursuit of the recorded material which has most inspired and shaped their sound today. Be sure to check out his new album Troper Sings Brion via Lame-O Records.
I haven’t listened to this expanded version, but I really like this album. I think this is like my favorite Lemonheads album. It’s kind of top loaded and then the second-half is all joke stuff and it’s one of those weird records from the CD era where it’s 50 minutes long. But I feel like Evan Dando is like a pin up and it seems like he’s trying to sort of rebel against that. I feel like that’s very palpable on this. So there’s a comp that came out like 10 years ago that was just Evan Dando demoing these songs in a hotel room with a tape recorder. So I think that a lot of this bonus stuff is the demos.
I think it’s my favorite Billy Joel record aside from the greatest hits volume one and two, which are the first Billy Joel albums I heard. I think he has no identity at all, but he’s a great pastiche artist. Every song it sounds like he’s doing a different voice and there are some great non-hits on this record like “Through The Long Night.”
I’ve never seen any of The Move’s vinyl. I saw one Move record in Liverpool one time and it was a mono pressing of the first record and it was really expensive. But aside from that, I’ve looked and never found a Move record. So it was cool to see this immediately. So This is Jeff Lynne‘s band pre-ELO and he was in The Move with this guy Roy Wood, and then they broke off and formed ELO together. But they had so many hits in the UK and they just never crossed over. They’ve got a lot of really great songs. It’s weird because Roy Wood sounds a lot like young Ozzy, so it’s kind of like if Ozzy did Pop. And this Genesis, I saw that you had a couple. It’s a live bootleg from the early Peter Gabriel era of Genesis. I saw the other one was from like 1973, but I’m guessing it’s a bootleg. I went through a period of really loving this band and then sometimes I’ll listen to it again and think it’s actually much stupider. I didn’t understand it really until I saw live footage and then it seemed really cool. He has all these crazy costumes. But then he also did a lot of stuff that feels very glam. I feel like that’s just not what a lot of prog bands were doing. So there was this really kind of, I don’t know, just a theatrical element to this band. I guess prog is theatrical, but I think that the fact that they all dressed up and that Peter Gabriel dressed up in all these crazy costumes is really cool.
My friend Lucas is in this band and we’ve talked about doing a split where we cover two of each other’s songs. His previous record Cosmonaut I really like, and the singles of this are great, but I haven’t really listened to this whole record, so I might get this too. I feel like sort of an impostor admitting that because we’re supposed to do this project together and he has asked me what songs I want to do and I just mentioned the singles.
