Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

Jon Brion's score for Michel Gondry's 2004 film is a timeless ambient masterpiece

There’s a key scene in Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, when the shy, introverted Joel (Jim Carrey) leaves the apartment of his crush, the outgoing, rebellious Clementine (Kate Winslet), after they first met.

Joel walks down the street and a sad, lo-fi-sounding guitar loop emerges. An ambiguous message to the audience: Shouldn’t he be happy? Shouldn’t his heart jump for joy?

But Joel doesn’t know how to feel about the unfolding relationship to Clementine. They will later both decide to have each other’s memories erased from their brains by a mysterious agency…

Everything from the fantastical storyline – conceived by Charlie Kaufman, who’d also written Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich – to the lighting design and colorgrading contributes to the movie’s distinctive atmosphere.

But when I first saw the film, I was most swept away by the music. Composer Jon Brion created a whimsical score that reflects the turbulent love affair between Joel and Clementine, their inner landscapes and unspoken emotions.

Jon Brion

In an eloquent article on its 20th anniversary in Paste magazine, writer Sage Dunlap calls the “stunning ambient score (…) a key component of the film’s profound beauty.”

She adds that “it’s arguably Jon Brion’s most famous score, and for good reason – he packed all of the film’s emotions into a cohesive soundscape that is deceptively simple, but harnesses nuanced emotional weight and a layered mixing of electronically-produced sounds and more traditional ambient instrumental compositions.”

The original soundtrack album includes 26 tracks. Nine are licensed songs that just appear in the film. The rest is made up of rather short instrumentals, all written by Brion. These drumless vignettes make up the heart of the film score.

Most consist of not much more than layered arpeggiated chords on strings, piano and nylon-string guitar. Some feature sparse percussion, like “Showtime”, where the muted piano is overshadowed by soft cymbals and ambient drones.

On some tracks, Brion applies electronic post-production, like on “Bookstore”, where he reverses the guitar part heard in “Phone Call” to give it a surreal quality.

Though it rarely appears at all, that guitar might be one of the most interesting elements of the soundtrack. Its characteristic lo-fi sound stems from two early 1970s keyboards, the Optigan and the Chilton TalentMaker.

Both of these machines work with optical discs that contain sampled classical guitar loops. As these discs tend to collect dirt and dust over time, they produce that crackling, warped sound heard in “Bookstore” and “Phone Call”.

It was exactly that wistful nostalgia that Michel Gondry had been searching for.

In a 2012 interview, the director talks about his reasons for commissioning Brion: “I listened to some of his soundtracks. They had the quality of being very melodic and classical, but very original at the same time.”

Brion was known as a perfectionist and an instrument nerd that keeps a collection of early analog synthesizers in his Los Angeles studio.

In the previous decade, he’d produced albums by Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright and Fiona Apple, shaping that era’s vintage indie pop sound.

Sean Lennon once likened the multi-instrumentalist to a “weird alien prodigy”.

Born in 1963, he grew up in a musical family in New Jersey, played in bands in the 1980s, then worked as a session musician and songwriter, before moving on to record production and soundtrack work.

Some of his early successes were his musical contributions to the films of director Paul Thomas Anderson, like 1999’s Magnolia, which got him a Grammy nomination, and 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love, released on avant-garde label Nonesuch to rave reviews.

While his long-awaited solo debut Meaningless was initially shelved due to a lack of commercial potential, he’d achieve another Grammy nomination for scoring Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, which came out in 2004.

Brion’s and Gondry’s biographies feature some striking similarities.

Coming from a musical family himself – his grandfather actually invented an early synthesizer, the Clavoline –, Gondry started out as a drummer in the French new wave band Oui Oui.

After shooting a few DIY music videos for his own band, he’d move on to work for artists such as Björk, Massive Attack, Daft Punk, Radiohead, The Chemical Brothers, Kylie Minogue, The White Stripes, and many others in the 1990s.

“He’s a very interesting person to talk with. He has a lot of great ideas and things”, Gondry said about Brion. “He’s a very classically trained, very good musician. It’s important for him that everything he does has to be really creative. And I think he brought something very warm and human and a coherency to the film.”

Gondry encouraged Brion to utilize some of those vintage synthesizers he had standing around his studio. The director knew some of these machines from his childhood, as he recounts in the aforementioned article:

“It's funny because you were talking about my grandfather inventing that keyboard. Jon has some old keyboards. My father, who is the son-in-law of my grandfather, took over his keyboard shop and he started to sell electronic synthesizers and organs and he had this very weird synthesizer called The Talentmaker. And I hadn't heard or seen one in 30 years. And when I went to see Jon he had this. So when you hear this very sad guitar that we use a lot [in the film] that's [The Talentmaker]. So you had the nostalgia of my grandfather's shop."

Eternal Sunshine Of A Spotless Mind’s nostalgic atmosphere influenced many ‘neoclassical’ composers and electronic musicians, indie and dreampop bands, even hip-hop artists: Kanye West would hire Brion to co-produce his sophomore album Late Registration (2005), and Jay Electronica would extensively sample the score for his 2007 breakthrough mixtape Act 1: Eternal Sunshine (the pledge).

Other than the work of these two artists, Brion’s gorgeous score hasn’t lost any of its appeal to me over the last two decades.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind was released on the Disney-owned Hollywood Records. Physical versions are out of print. You can find it on streaming services, but the Spotify version misses some of the best tracks (among other tracks, “Bookstore” is currently greyed out in my region).

The 20-minute YouTube playlist skips all the licensed songs, leaving just the score. To me, this comes close to a definitive version, but I’d also skip “Strings That Tie To You” – the only song that features Brion’s own vocals and hasn’t aged as well as the instrumentals.

Happy new year!