At What Comes After The Blues, Secretly Group Celebrates Its Three-Decade Journey To The Forefront Of Indie Music

“It’s been a bit like a family reunion,” Ben Swanson said onstage at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on Saturday night. “The good kind, not the kind where your weird uncle says mildly inappropriate things all night.” He was addressing a crowd of 600 or so, made up of longtime Secretly Group employees, former associates, artists, and locals from the community in Bloomington, Indiana. Everyone was gathered for What Comes After The Blues: Secretly 30, a three-day event celebrating three decades of Secretly, the label group encompassing Dead Oceans, Jagjaguwar, Secretly Canadian, and a host of other independent music institutions. His sentiment — the family reunion bit, weird uncle joke aside — was something I heard echoed time and time again through the weekend. Ben, along with his brother Chris, founded Secretly Canadian back in 1996, while they were still students at Bloomington’s Indiana University. A few years later, they joined forces with Darius Van Arman, who had launched Jagjaguwar. Then, in 2007, Phil Waldorf entered with Dead Oceans. Now, the four founders/owners watch over a label group that has grown from scrappy small-town origins to being one of the most lauded and influential entities in the indie space. For their 30th anniversary, they announced a weekend takeover of Bloomington, featuring readings, parties, and four distinct shows meant to trace the past, present, and future of the label. Appropriately, it kicked off with a night that brought it back to the beginning. It took place at the Bluebird, a bar venue in Bloomington’s downtown. A staple in Bloomington, the Bluebird has plenty of history with the local music scene. “This night is more local vibes,” Van Arman explained to me as we watched Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co. “It’s all Midwestern bands, it’s all the old heads.” June Panic, the singer-songwriter who opened the proceedings, was the first ever artist signed to Secretly. Early Day Miners, who took the stage next, released a string of albums on the label through the ’00s. Building up to Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co., the first night underlined the origin story — a couple of kids out in the Midwest, carving their own path removed from the hubs of Los Angeles and New York, finding strange and idiosyncratic music at the intersection of Americana and indie. That, of course, was massively driven by Jason Molina, whose late ’90s/early ’00s ascent with Songs: Ohia first put Secretly on the map (and whose album What Comes After The Blues gave the weekend its name). Launched last year, Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co. finds Centro-Matic’s Will Johnson performing Molina’s music with the surviving members of Magnolia Electric Co. The group’s scorching two-and-a-half-hour set was a fitting tribute to the work Molina left behind when he tragically passed in 2011. Their renditions of “Lioness” and “John Henry Split My Heart” were particularly potent, but of course it was the climactic “Farewell Transmission” that hit hardest. At the same time it said goodbye and honored the label’s history with Molina, it also felt like the curtain rise on the whole event. June PanicIn the second half of its existence, Secretly Group grew — a lot. Part of the reason everybody kept remarking on the reunion vibes was that people had flown in from Los Angeles and London and New York, where most of the actual label operations are now with distribution remaining centered in Bloomington. They also have footholds across Europe and as far as Sydney. But the premise of What Comes After The Blues was to call everyone back home, to where it all started. And no matter how global the label group’s reach, the Bloomington roots are still crucial to its identity, and, by the partners’ estimations, their success. On Friday evening, I sat with Chris, Ben, and Van Arman on the street outside the Buskirk-Chumley. As newly returned IU students flocked from bar to bar, each founder explained their view of the label’s core DNA, early wins, and where it leaves them now. Early Day Miners“We were lucky it was Bloomington,” Van Arman said of Secretly’s somewhat unexpected home. “It gave us space to make mistakes, and it allowed us to build our distribution system. When the industry hit hard times, we actually had a stronger position than we would have had otherwise.” Being more off-the-beaten path in the industry landscape meant the early days of Secretly and Jag were kept low-cost and low-pressure. They were allowed to be kids and figure it out, to some extent. But in more or less pre-internet times, it also meant they had a disposition unlike peers and competitors in the coastal bubbles. “You still want to be able to chart a unique path,” Ben, the sole founder who still resides in Bloomington, reflected. “We do great work in our London, New York, and LA offices, but it doesn’t need to be solely about those markets. We knew early on we couldn’t be a local — or even regional — label, but we have a different perspective thanks to our roots here.” Kevin MorbyThere were several turning points where the Swanson brothers and Van Arman knew that things were changing. In the earliest days, each new Songs: Ohia record heightened Molina’s profile and therefore the label’s; Chris also pointed to Ahnoni And The Johnsons’ 2005 release I Am A Bird Now as a watershed moment. But then there was 2008, and Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. The album would soon launch Justin Vernon into what was then an entirely unlikely mainstream crossover — though less startling today, it was mind-boggling to hear an indie-folk artist on Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy alongside Jay-Z and Elton John and Rihanna. In turn, the labels’ slow, incremental growth began to snowball as they entered the 2010s. This was the decade in which I was a young music journalist, and I often think of it as Secretly’s decade. Always dedicated to fostering emergent voices, the combined forces of Secretly Canadian, Jagjaguwar, and Dead Oceans struck incredible momentum in the ’10s. They introduced the world to Angel Olsen, Mitski, and Japanese Breakfast. Sharon Van Etten and the War On Drugs released their breakthrough albums. You get the picture: After their first 15 years, Secretly Group had gone from a cultish Midwest curio to a label that was defining the sound of indie. Then, as the decade waned, Dead Oceans released a debut for a then-barely-known Phoebe Bridgers. At that point, they ended up influencing even the pop world, and began to compete with major labels. The journey was not without learning curves and bumps. Ben recalls a royalties meeting with Molina at his Bloomington apartment, give or take around Songs: Ohia’s 1999 LP Axxess & Ace. At the time, Chris was still doing the label’s accounting by hand. “We thought we were being all indie and went over with a legal pad,” Ben laughed. “He looked at us like, ‘Dudes, go back and try this again.’” The Swansons upgraded to spreadsheets. “Our success began to compound,” Chris said. “At one point maybe we had a big record every year, then it was two, three. We began to delineate our roles as partners, to hire experts to join to the staff.” The arc of the label, naturally, strikes them each as surreal upon Secretly 30. Amidst all the celebration, there are still little moments for wistfulness: Given the scope of Secretly’s operations now, the equations are different. They still seek to break new artists, but also consider projects that have a bit more exposure already. “After the evolution over the last 10 years, we have a pretty clear idea of where we sit,” Ben concluded. “We still see ourselves as really trying to be one of the champions for the independent ecosystem.” Jordan PattersonJust as Thursday’s Bluebird gig represented the earliest days of Secretly Canadian, Friday’s Buskirk-Chumley Theater show represented those years of expansion. The night opened with a newer signing, Jordan Patterson. She’s one of those artists where you wonder where in the hell that voice is coming from once she’s singing — in between songs, she sounds almost shy as she spins little anecdotes and punchlines, but then in song twists and throws her voice in wholly unique directions. It was just Patterson and her guitar, setting the stage for an evening of spare, conversational singer-songwriter performances. After Patterson, Kevin Morby and Sharon Van Etten each performed solo, flanked by guitars, drum machines, and a piano. Both also served as ambassadors of a sort for the weekend. It was a more hushed, reverent environment than the Bluebird show, but still familial. In fact, it was Morby’s first show as a new dad, and he’d only stepped back onstage for his other family at Secretly. “I’ve been in a baby bubble,” he quipped. “Now I’m in this room full of people.” Morby built his set only around songs from his Dead Oceans albums, including highlights from his acclaimed album earlier this year, Little Wide Open, and closing with “Singing Saw,” the title track of his first Dead Oceans release in 2016. Van Etten followed suit, performing a unique set only derived from Jagjaguwar records, but including some material fans may not have heard for some time given the focus of her Attachment Theory tours. There was something powerful in that, Van Etten admitting she felt pretty vulnerable but pushing through new arrangements and renditions of songs as well as some unexpected favorites — piano readings of “Comeback Kid” and “Malibu,” a heart-rending “Give Out.” Van Etten filled her set with tributes and stories from across the Secretly years, remembering the first time she met Van Arman, way back when she worked at Brooklyn’s Ba Da Bing Records and he was visiting New York. She talked about putting gatefolds together with him, one instance of recurring depictions of Secretly’s founders as dedicated, honest music fans willing to do every aspect of the job. “[Secretly’s] a beautiful group of friends in it for all the right reasons, who will roll up their sleeves and do the work with you,” she said onstage. “I’m so fortunate I get to feel a community everywhere I go in the world because of the world Secretly has built. I feel like I’ve grown up with them.” Sharon Van EttenFor the final day of Secretly 30, they threw a daytime block party at their offices. Surrounded by blown-up, framed album covers of now-iconic SVE and Bon Iver albums and records from a new generation of definitive Secretly artists like Chanel Beads, everyone had gathered for a bit of ceremony: the indie quintet Racecourse signing their contract in person. “We don’t usually get to do it this way,” Waldorf smiled as the band, some of them wearing oversized suits for the occasion, encircled the contract atop record crates. “We’re usually just sending a Docusign.” This time, instead, a weekend of history now pointed ahead, and Ben was on hand to pop a bottle of champagne to mark it. Given the weekend alluded to the past, present, and future, I had taken to asking the founders what they hoped for tomorrow. For Chris, there are ways in which things have moved forward but had throughlines, or incorporated full circle moments. “Durand Jones is from a different world in terms of genre,” he explained. “But we met them when they were students in Bloomington. It’s very much Midwest, but a different version.” Similarly, Racecourse fits right into Secretly Group’s aesthetic wheelhouse, but also brings them back to the era of helping ascendant acts build from the ground up. In a separate conversation, Jon Coombs, the VP of A&R across the labels, described a Jenga-esque puzzle to the strategy of new signings. From Jordan Patterson to Racecourse and some yet-to-be-announced newcomers, he envisions building a new class of breakthrough talent akin to the wave of ’10s artists Secretly helped shepherd into the world. For much of the weekend, there was a casual, homespun vibe to the shows — rather than some blowout festival in a major city, Waldorf said, “It feels very us.” This sentiment was still there for Saturday’s finale, even if the show existed on a larger scale, taking over the stage at Switchyards Park. There’s a summer concert series, and also the local Granfalloon festival of arts and music, referencing Indiana’s own Kurt Vonnegut. (A few people were walking around the grounds with a giant Vonnegut effigy.) Secretly partnered with them for a final show featuring Angela Autumn, Jensen McRae, and Durand Jones & The Indications. A friend of the label, Autumn’s set showcased her idiosyncratic take on Appalachian folk that’s been garnering her new attention this year ahead of Believer. From there, the show designated “the future” by establishing Secretly Group’s ongoing exploration of other genres far removed from the rangey rock of the early years. Backstage before the show, Jensen McRae told me about how profound an influence Phoebe Bridgers had been on her, citing Stranger In The Alps as the album that taught her about specificity in songwriting; you could hear that inspiration in McRae’s own blend of pop and singer-songwriter material. Then there was a completely different vibe for the sinuous soul of Durand Jones & The Indications, local heroes who drew the largest crowd of the weekend. They were the perfect soundtrack for a hot Saturday night, but also symbolic of where Secretly had come from and where they were going — always exploring new horizons, but never forgetting the perspective that came from originating in Bloomington. Jensen McRaeThere was actually one more show after the last show — a smaller event for the close circle and the old heads once more. Back in town, Racecourse made their debut as a Jagjaguwar band at the Blockhouse, a venue that basically feels like a VFW basement with wood-panel walls and a rather homespun stage in the corner — a perfect room in which to see a sweaty rock show. You could hear traces of classic emo in the band’s instrumentation, and moments that gestured at shoegaze and krautrock, but altogether it fused into something that felt quintessentially indie rock in a pure and exhilarating way. The weekend had condensed a journey of 30 years into three nights, from June Panic conjuring the mid-’90s to Racecourse plotting a course to what’s next. OK, there was actually one more epilogue beyond the epilogue. Late Saturday night, following Racecourse, Blockhouse hosted one of the rare reunions of Tammar. Featuring Ben Swanson, his wife, and former Secretly associates, it was more like friends getting back together to play for friends. At that point, the room was full of those who had been around since the beginning, recalling how far things had come while Tammar’s frazzled psych-rock reverberated around the room. Angela AutumnAt the end of the “future” day, I wasn’t thinking about a Secretly that would look drastically different in another 10 years. I was thinking about one that would continue to build upon foundations they had never forgotten, even in years where it seemed they were taking new directions. To hear each of them speak of it now, three decades have yielded balance and clarity. “We’re still doing the same thing we were doing in the beginning,” Chris told me. “We’re attracted to interesting voices. We want great songs and unique characters. We’re back to what it’s always been, looking for music you want to play over and over again.”Durand Jones