Video Of The Week: The Secret Storm

The Secret Storm is Lauren Hoffman's latest musical identity, which reflects the fact that she now tours with additional musicians (Hoffman only singing and no longer playing guitar, Cathy Monnes on cello and electric violin, Tony Lechmanski on guitar, Jeff Diehm on bass, Jordan Marchini on drums, and Ethan Lipscomb on keyboard), and her songs are more universal and somehow more personal now that we can separate the artist from the person, as they no longer share the same name (though I still think Broken, which I have covered live and as a fan club single a decade ago with the gender/storyline reversed, remains her best work).

In her own words:

I’ve never felt good about recording under my own name. The ‘Lauren Hoffman’ that shows up on the credit card receipt at the grocery store and the ‘Lauren Hoffman’ who shows up on Spotify just felt like two very different things. I’ve also never really identified with ‘singer/songwriter’ as a genre, even though I am technically a singer and a songwriter. There is this folky connotation that never quite sat right with me. But the main reason for the change is that working under the name The Secret Storm creates this a psychological distinction between me as a person and the work itself. It’s liberating.

In addition to being a long-time fan of her work, there are a few career path similarities between she and I: she was signed to Virgin Records in 1997 and I signed with them in November 1998; she asked out of her contract in 1999, and I was terminated from mine (along with pretty much everyone else not named Lenny Kravitz or Smashing Pumpkins from the Virgin/EMI stable), and since then we've been honing our respective crafts to the best of our abilities - and hers far outrank mine, obviously.

Earlier this summer, The Secret Storm released the In The Sun EP, of which this is the title track, in a video directed by Thomas Smith: