Spies and Secrets: Secrets and Lies

Jonatha Brooke: Secrets and Lies
[purchase]

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.

Songs From Poems: love is more thicker than forget

The Story: love is more thicker than forget

[purchase] / [read the poem]

The ever-lowercase e.e. cummings isn't the obvious choice for lyrical source material, even when his poems scan, as in the 4x4 series from whence this transformed verse comes. The language borders on cryptic abstraction, with voiced emotion and fragmented narrative taking the place of the more traditional verse structure which he learned from, and it tends to break funny between lines.

But Jonatha Brooke and Jennifer Kimball, in a coda from their debut duo pairing The Story, found their tendency towards playfully beautiful soaring and dischordant harmonies perfect for the piece, and for e.e. cummings' style overall, managing with just piano and two voices to create an incredibly successful environment for what is often a gorgeous yet difficult-to-fully-access poetic method. They do it so well, in fact, that as in the original poem, the pauses between lines speak as loud as the words themselves: the sparseness sings, and the self-referential imagery of love's extremity rises and fades with the cross and flow of these two voices into sky and sea and everything between.

Leftovers (Title Tracks): The Angel In The House

The Story: The Angel In The House

[purchase]

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.