Play Me Backwards

There’s an old joke about what returns when you play a country song backward: your spouse, your job, your dog. Maybe that’s also what you get if you play Jonatha Brooke‘s 1997 album 10 Cent Wings that way; in the months surrounding its recording and release, the singer buried her father and her dog, divorced her husband and received pink slips from her label and music publisher.

“That was more a breakup album than either of us knew,” Brooke says by telephone from Boston, the hometown from which she moved to Los Angeles during that same turbulent year. The other half of her “us” is Alain Mallet, who produced Wings and Brooke’s previous album, Plumb. “We were still cool then, but it deteriorated after we finished the album. But ‘Shame on Us’ was already a devastating end-of-a-love song.”

So are several other numbers on the shimmering, ruminative Wings, a disc that turned out to be unsettlingly prescient in its downcast imagery. But the songs Brooke has written since then, which make up the core of this year’s fine Steady Pull, reflect almost none of her personal upheaval—unless you count the positive effects.

“I fell in love,” Brooke explains. “A lot of the new songs happened during a two-week period in the fall of 1999. In October, I was in Colorado on a mountainside by myself, which is where the bulk of the songs were written. I was in the middle of this giddy phase of a new relationship, so a lot of the songs are definitely buoyant.”

Brooke’s songs have always tiptoed between ruddy exuberance and pale disappointment. Her perky albums with former singing partner Jennifer Kimball — they called themselves The Story — were politely acerbic musings on friendship and love, the kind of pleasant, melodic odes favored by public radio music programs (such as The World Café, which still champions Brooke). Plumb and Wings, minus Kimball, were each significant steps forward, harmony no longer the point of the more plaintive, sometimes hesitant solo vocals.

On Steady Pull, though, Brooke’s singing comes in undiluted colors, starting with the green-light-peal-out of the opening cut, “Linger” (Well here I go, she sings on her way out of a relationship). The explosive final moments of Wings find resolution on Pull then and there, allowing Brooke to slip into something more comfortable: the slinky “How Deep Is Your Love?” (not a Bee Gees cover), the seductive “New Dress.” (Pull‘s other garment song, “Red Dress,” might be the uniform to which Brooke refers in “New Dress,” clothing of failed seduction removed not for play, but to be discarded.)

“I was just so happy to write so many uptempo funky, sexy songs,” Brooke says. “It was a decision on my part for me to go that direction. I do love darkly bitter, angst-ridden songs, but I really had to say that I’d already done that plenty.” At 37, the singer says she feels “the best ever.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier or more at home in my own skin,” she continues. “I feel finally like I’ve figured myself out and how much I love what I do. I feel incredibly centered. My band is rocking, and I can’t seem to stop grinning.”

To smile again, Brooke had to put behind her the loss of label support and collaborator. “It was a typical story,” Brooke says. “There was a lot of turmoil at my particular label, Refuge, which was part of MCA. We were only two months into working 10 Cent Wings at radio, but so much was going on there that when my contract option came up, they let me go. They wanted to cut my budget to half of what the contract specified, so I came up with a compromise of my own: I offered them six months to decide whether to keep me while they helped me promote the record. I faxed my proposal to them on a Friday and didn’t hear back from them, but the next Monday, the label people had notes on their desks saying I was no longer on MCA. But everyone I know has been dropped by at least one major label. Eventually, I realized it was such a gift. As much as I was depressed for a couple of weeks, I saw that I wasn’t trapped anymore.”

After a tour that continued at much expense when MCA backed out its support, Brooke issued a live disc from those shows in 1999, the first release on her Bad Dog Records. It was a transitional disc, a stopgap while Brooke wrote and wondered how she would record her next studio album without producer/arranger Mallet.

“I was terrified,” Brooke says. “I didn’t know if I could do it. I’d never worked this way before, been involved in every musical decision. Luckily, the moment when I knew I could do it came early. I had the first song ready. ‘Linger’ was the first thing we put down, and we wanted it to feel live. Playing it with just a drummer and getting it down unpolished was exactly right.” Brooke says she was able to form tight bonds with the musicians on the album, spending less time than she feared would be needed just humming and singing to them and relying on their canny impulses to arrange the songs. It worked. Less fussy than Wings, Pull is Brooke’s most musically confident album, matching the newfound strut of her resurgent love life to hip-hop beats and aggressive electric guitars.

It helped that Brooke was working with Bob Clearmountain, probably the most trusted recording masterer in popular music. Steady Pull marks a rare return to production duties for Clearmountain, who Brooke says declared himself a fan during the making of Wings and vowed his support for future projects.

“He has an amazing studio in his basement,” Brooke says. “But it’s a mastering studio, so there’s no performance space. We’d record sitting on couches or on the floor. Bob said he just wanted to be involved in what I did next, so coproducing it seemed perfect. And there was a real camaraderie with the musicians, who came up with great chord progressions and melodic parts.”

The backbone of her studio band—guitarist Goffrey Moore, drummer Larry Aberman and bass player Darren Embry—is now on the road with Brooke, the first time she’s fronted a rock quartet “in a couple of years,” she says.

“I still love the songs on 10 Cent Wings,” Brooke says. “I can get caught up in the emotion of performing them because they’re so evocative and poignant, but it doesn’t affect me. I don’t hold back in the writing process. In performing the songs, I’ve had to figure out that they’re not completely about me. They’re about everyone in the audience who’s had that experience.”

Because most of her fans haven’t had the experience of being dropped by MCA, Brooke doesn’t address her business in song. “I’ve never written a song about hating my label,” she confirms. “Whatever disappointment or hurt I feel about that or anything, it’s not the audience’s problem. My job is to convey the songs and entertain with them. The audience doesn’t care if I have a label deal or not, and their support of me is what bolstered my confidence. I realized I had a career no matter what MCA wanted to do, so I got happier and happier. I’m not afraid of anything anymore.”