Mo Troper – Troper Sings Brion (2023)

Mo Troper is a Portland-based indie singer, songwriter, and guitarist whose music takes listeners on an emotional trip, with the upbeat energy of his classic-style pop melodies facing up against lyrics that ask pointed, sardonic questions about the world around him. Troper's songs draw on the frameworks of vintage 1960s and '70s pop tunes, but he adds his own share of contemporary twist and turns, with elements of lo-fi and indie pop putting rough edges on the smooth melodic surfaces. Troper's first two proper albums, 2016's Beloved and 2017's Exposure & Response found him approaching his music within a straightforward pop framework, while 2021's Dilettante and 2022's MTV were more experimental, adding expressive noise and buzzy experimentation to the mix.
Based in Portland, Oregon, Mo Troper was born in 1992; his great-grandmother was Pearl Argyle, a celebrated actress and ballet dancer in the '20s and '30s, while his grandfather Steven Bernhardt worked as a producer and assistant director in film and television during the '60s and '70s. Troper's father was an obsessive Beatles fan, and Mo grew up absorbing the influences of the Fab Four and other '60s pop acts. In his teens, he began making his way into the Portland D.I.Y. music scene. While in high school, Troper and drummer Nate Sonefeld formed the band Your Rival, who specialized in "fun songs about horrible things." In 2013, they released an album, Here's to Me, through the local punk label Party Damage Records. The band soon broke up, and Troper worked with the groups TeenSpot and Sancho before he decided it was time to strike out on his own. In 2015, Troper spent several months housesitting for his grandmother, and he used the time to work on his songwriting. Troper took the songs he'd written and booked time at a Portland recording studio called the Magic Closet. The result was Troper's first solo album, 2016's Beloved, which featured a statue of Pearl Argyle on the front cover; it was released by Good Cheer Records, a label founded by Troper. The album received rave reviews in the Pacific Northwest music press, and in February 2017 he dropped Mo Troper Gold, a collection of orphaned songs he'd written between 2010 and 2015. November 2017 saw the release of Exposure & Response, Troper's most ambitious work to date, which dressed up his '60s-inspired melodies with horns and strings along with drums and guitars.
Various projects kept Troper occupied in 2018 and '19, but 2020 brought a pair of releases. Natural Beauty was an eleven-song set of well-crafted tunefulness, with Troper once again playing most of the instruments himself, and Moreover, Pt. 2 (Demos, Outtakes, Ect.) was another collection of studio leftovers that included fourteen originals as well as covers of tunes by the Beatles, Sheryl Crow, Nintendo composer Koji Kondo, and the Wonders, the fictive band from Tom Hanks's movie That Thing You Do. 2021's Dilettante was an epic-scale 28-song double album, in which Troper dipped his toes into noisier indie pop territory, though his melodies were as approachable as ever. He once again demonstrated his appreciation for the classics later that year with Revolver, a playful but faithful song-by-song cover of the Beatles's 1966 classic. September 2022 brought MTV, a fifteen-track effort that saw Troper digging deeper into noisy, lo-fi production and a more wilfully eccentric brand of pop songcraft.