It’s tempting to call A Secret Life, Marianne Faithfull and Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti’s lushly orchestrated and emotional 1995 collaboration a “lost” album but frankly, I don’t think it was ever really “found” in the first place. Although it’s a superb record, how many people have ever heard it or even heard of it? Can something be called a “cult” album if no such cult for it exists?
It’s too bad, because A Secret Life is a fascinating album. I picked up my copy in a cut-out bin right after it came out for a dollar and although I’ve always liked it quite a bit, I don’t think I know anyone else who knows it and I’ve never had a conversation with anyone about it. There’s very, very little to read online about it. You can find it for 50 cents used on Amazon. I’m not saying it’s “rare” when you can just click on a YouTube link and hear the entire thing, but certainly the case can easily be made that there’s been a certain unfair indifference to the album, which other than a greatest hits collection, is probably the single best thing in Faithfull’s catalog. But unless you’re a big fan of hers, where would you have ever have heard it?
Bookended by spoken word recitations of passages from Dante and Shakespeare, A Secret Life plays out like a tragic concept album about a doomed love affair from the woman’s point of view. Although I’m not sure that this was necessarily the intention of the artists, if you listen to it like that it becomes a more powerful experience and the poetry of the lyrics become that much more potent and just… sad. It’s one of those albums that really demands to be listened to from start to finish.
In any case, the occasion for this post is that I pulled the CD of A Secret Life out the other day for the first time in… well, a very long time, and it still packs quite an emotional punch. I looked on YouTube to see if there were any clips of her promoting it on TV when it came out, and there wasn’t much, mostly a music video and a great performance of the album’s penultimate (and best) song, “The Stars Lined Up” on Later… with Jools Holland. If you find this intriguing, again, you can buy the CD on Amazon for fifty cents. I daresay it’s worth a lot more…
“The Stars Lined Up” begins at the 8:15 mark.
The music video for “Bored by Dreams”:
“Flaming September”
“She”