Spies and Secrets: Secrets and Lies

Jonatha Brooke: Secrets and Lies
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This theme was inspired by the recent revelations that there is a chance that the President of the United States has been acting as a secret agent of Russia, possibly our country’s biggest enemy. This potential disloyalty is unprecedented, I think (there were some who thought that Jefferson was too pro-French back in the wigs and guillotine days, but there are differences).

On the other hand, Trump is consistent about one thing-- he is fiercely loyal to himself, and if he is working on behalf of Russia, it is because he is trying to protect his money or his reputation. Or both. Or, I guess, it could just be because he lacks any understanding of American foreign or domestic policy. Or all of the above.

Plus, he has lied more than any prior president—making more than 8,000 misleading statements or blatant lies in two years. The whataboutists, of course, point out that President Obama’s claims about his health care legislation were not 100% accurate, so that’s one. 7,999 plus to go.

It seemed to me that Jonatha Brooke’s song, “Secrets and Lies,” from her 1997 album, 10¢ Wings, fit the bill. It should not be confused with the 1996 Mike Leigh film Secrets & Lies, or the ABC show from a couple of years ago, Secrets and Lies, neither of which I have seen.

Brooke and Jennifer Kimball (a childhood friend of my wife’s) began singing together at Amherst College, and recorded a couple of albums together as The Story, before breaking up. 10¢ Wings was her second solo album (although the first was credited to Jonatha Brooke & The Story, but Kimball was not part of it). “Secrets and Lies” is not about politics, or about secret agents, but about the everyday evasions and withholdings that underlie so many of our relationships, and how one perseveres.

It is a symptom of the state of the music business that Brooke, a great songwriter and singer, never had the success that she, and others, expected. In fact, as she told sportswriter Jeff Pearman (writer of a great book about the 1986 Mets, among other things--the description of the plane ride home from the World Series is still one of the funniest and grossest things I've read), in a 2013 interview on his blog:

it totally sucked getting dropped when “Secrets and Lies” was just beginning to chart at Triple A radio … MCA actually called the stations that were playing me and told them to stop. 

Read that again—her label dropped her and called radio stations and told them to stop playing the song that they had released. I hope that the program directors either told MCA to fuck off, or said, fine, but we are going to replace it with a song from another label. Any other label.

For what it is worth, MCA Records had been subsumed by Universal (run by music biz legend, and briefly my former boss, Doug Morris, who hired Jay Boberg, who I’m pretty sure I dealt with when I was at WPRB, to run the label), which itself went through all sorts of management and structural changes, and in 2003, the MCA name was essentially retired.

Brooke had the last laugh, outliving MCA, releasing a bunch of albums on her own Bad Dog Records, including an album of songs with unreleased Woody Guthrie lyrics (in the Mermaid Avenue tradition), and performing a well-received Off-Broadway one-woman show, My Mother Has 4 Noses, about her relationship with her mother, who suffered from dementia.

Roads/Streets: Bleecker Street

Jonatha Brooke: Bleecker Street (Simon & Garfunkel cover) [purchase]

Bleecker Street, the New York City East-to-West thoroughfare that gives this song its name - once known as a nexus of the American bohemian movement and now home to Marc Jacobs stores and an apparently still-hopping nightclub district - is unquestionably a touchstone of art and culture: home of CBGB and Cafe Wha?, where Hendrix, Dylan, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor began their careers, it is name-dropped in lyrics by Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Fred Neil, Iggy Pop, Paulo Nutini, Steely Dan, and the title of an opera which won its composer the Pulitzer Prize in music upon its release in 1955.

According to Wikipedia, is it also the home of Doctor Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum and the restaurant Woody Allen's character owned in the movie Sleeper (The Happy Carrot). More recently, it served as the inspiration and name for a line of bags from popular designer Coach. Pretty cool, for a single street.

I've never been to Bleecker Street, and to be fair, I'm not likely to have reason to do so any time soon, unless I suddenly decide I want to hang out at its upscale eateries, or ogle Alicia Keys as she walks out of her stately home in the Village. But I've lived this song, pulled from Simon & Garfunkel sleeper debut Wednesday Morning 3 A.M., where it stands as one of just four original songs from a duo whose career would go on to help define the street in the wake of The British Invasion.

Bleecker Street never charted, though I'd argue it's one of Simon's finest, simplest compositions, a love song to the down and out that chills the bones. But its the cover, by Jonatha Brooke, which we've chosen to share today. Brooke's version recaptures the sweet ache of the dissatisfied outsider that so typifies the work of this particular place and sound in the distance between her inimitable voice and its ringing, high-production contemporary production; it appears on Bleecker Street: Greenwich Village In The 60's, an appropriately titled "various artists" collection of tender tributes to the great songs first written, performed, and celebrated in and around Bleecker that comes highly recommended, with beauty galore from Ron Sexsmith, Suzanne Vega and John Cale, Loudon Wainwright, and others. I listen to the album often, but ultimately and inevitably come back to this cut for the way it gentrifies bohemia without aggression, even as it celebrates its past - and so it is ever thus, on street and in song.

2001: Linger

Jonatha Brooke: Linger

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It's funny the things you remember. I was only ever in Missouri for a few hours, when I flew into the St. Louis airport to visit a friend living in Southern Illinois, and yet in my few hours there, I purchased this album.

This song became my favorite from the album, I loved the lyrics. A few years later when I was attending grad school I used a quote from this song as an away message on my computer. The quote being:

You saw me through the key hole
Of a door that I kept locked
But I decorate the threshold
Just in case you knocked.
I thought it made a nice away message, and one of my roommates at the time very much agreed. She saw it and instantly loved it and wanted to know what it was from. I ended up making her a mix with the song on it. She was grateful, but thought the song didn't live up to the marvelous quote. I had to explain that Jonatha Brooke was what they often referred to as a "songwriter's songwriter" and it took a few listens to fall in love...as I had felt the same way when I first listened to her and now she is one of my favorites. And indeed, my roommate kept listening and then began to adore it. It's always a fond memory when you can share something you love with others and see the light go on for them as well.

Leftovers (Title Tracks): The Angel In The House

The Story: The Angel In The House

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Long before Jonatha Brooke was a folkpop star, and Jennifer Kimball a lesser-known but no less talented interpreter and craftsperson in the Boston singer-songwriter scene, the two whet their teeth on the folkscene as The Story, a duo which came together when the two discovered each other finding beautiful, oft-dissonant harmonies among the more mainstream triads while in a chorus at Amherst College in 1981.

Local buskers at first, and then struggling artists with day jobs through most of the decade after graduation, the girls were finally signed in 1989, and things looked good for a while. But sadly, artistic differences soared even as Electra Records cherry-picked 'em from lesser-known folk label Green Linnet for a debut rerelease and a second album in 1993, using their sound to leverage an entry into the fledgling AAA radio format. Though the effort was a critical success by all accounts - WXPN listeners named The Angel In The House the #1 album of the year upon its release - the band dissolved the following year, and Brooke took the name and ran away with it, only shedding "and the Story" from her band name for her own sophomore effort.

Since then, both artists have tended to avoid mention of their time together, as if to suggest that their small canon represents the best of neither. But though the duo was obscure and short-lived, thanks to a command performance as "Jonatha and Jennifer" in the library at my high school just after their first album came out on, their twenty-odd collected works still echo in my ears, surfacing on mix tapes and finding their way into the perennial lists I make in anticipation of a week's theme here at Star Maker Machine - which is where I found this one, a high-production yet no less moving also-ran worth reheating, the title track from their final release.

Come to think of it, this would have made a solid story for our recent Discoveries theme, too. C'est la vie, I guess.

Guest Stars: Steady Pull

Jonatha Brooke feat. Michael Franti: Steady Pull

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2001's Steady Pull represented new directions for Jonatha Brooke. She had just completed a cross country move prior to recording the album and was feeling refreshed and reinvigorated in the studio.

The album itself contained many artistic leaps and experiments for Brooke. She co-produced the album, played several instruments (guitars, wurlitzer, finger bells, ukulele, piano, bass), and even arranged strings for the first time in her career. The feeling of experimentation was carried over on the album's title track as well when Brooke enlisted the help of socially conscious hip-hop artist Michael Franti. Franti's involvement is minimal on the track... mostly just a background vocal. His presence, however, lends credibility to the track that the folky Brooke may not have been able to achieve by herself.

Brooke says she just wanted the song to have a nice groove. Franti's funky vocals helped to ensure that happened.

April Fools: Genius or a Fool

Jonatha Brooke: Genius or a Fool

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I respect comedians immensely. I think it's such a talent to be able to understand what is funny and what is not, what crosses the line between funny and inappropriate and the timing to pull it all off and get the best result. Someone might make an ass of themselves and look ridiculous, but it's when they know exactly what they're doing and to what affect (specifically, I enjoy it when they can make everyone in a room laugh without hurting anyone's feelings or simply out of shock value) that it becomes not foolish and instead is genius.

In the same regard, most of the groundbreaking innovations in thought and invention have been scoffed at when they first came on the scene. Those willing to step out of the painting and re-position the frame are the ones that take the biggest risks and also have the potential for the most gain. Only when people think differently and question what is normal do we ever change anything. Einstein was considered a dunce as a child and went on to be the genius of an era, and in his day, Socrates was made fun of by the nobleman for being ugly and full of nonsense.

In "Genius or a Fool", off of the brilliant album "10 cent Wings", Jonatha Brooke discusses this dichotomy. All great new things have to begin somewhere, and so when we take that leap of faith and go against the grain, we may be a fool for not doing it the way it's always been done that makes sense to everyone else, or we may be a genius for discovering something new. It may all simply depend on the perspective on which you look at this new path.

Johns: Jonatha Brooke

Jonatha Brooke: Made of Gold

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When I told my wife what this week's theme was here at SMM, the first thing she asked me was, "So... does Jonatha Brooke count?" Then she made me promise that I would offer up some of Jonatha's music for everyone. Jonatha is one of my wife's favorite artists, and someone who I have come to enjoy over the past couple of years as well.

Jonatha Brooke began her career in the early '80s by pairing with vocalist Jennifer Kimball while the two were both freshmen at Amherst College in Massachusetts. After a few years of playing the local circuit billed as Jonatha and Jennifer, the duo (now known as The Story) released their first album, Grace in Gravity, in 1991.

By 1994, however, Brooke and Kimball had split. 1995's Plumb, although it is credited as Jonatha Brooke & The Story, is actually Jonatha's first solo record. The track I have offered here, "Made of Gold," is the song that introduced me to Jonatha's music, and has grown to be one of my favorite tracks from her. It's a powerful song that Jonatha says was written at a time when many women she knew were struggling through some sort of physical or emotional abuse. A great example of her songwriting talents.

Side note: Jonatha Brooke's latest album was released last month. It's a collection of songs featuring Woody Guthrie's words set to Jonatha's music.