Richard Swift - Dressed Up For The Letdown (Secretly 25th Anniversary Exclusive White Vinyl)

In a backyard in Bloomington, Secretly Canadian’s physical and spiritual home, Jason Molina once jammed part of a broken guitar into a maple tree. Rather than break the tree or shatter the neck, the maple absorbed this shrapnel, frets and all, patiently forming an unexpected and unlikely totem for Secretly Canadian’s own story. That story is, at its core, an Odd Couple story. It is the story of a label with an otherworldly mind and midwestern heart: Avante-garde and Americana, high art and high plains, patient growth b/w wild leaps of faith. Unexpected partners and unlikely pairings, all. Throughout Secretly Canadian’s history and its landmark releases, there is a sense of utility driving both work and art made with few boundaries and limitless imagination. It’s in the way Molina writes about the moon. It’s in Anohni’s transcendent, urgent I Am A Bird Now. It’s in the motorik beat and celestial solos of the War on Drugs, and it’s in the emphatic love declarations of serpentwithfeet.