A Conversation with Jonatha Brooke (continued)

PM: I really liked all the trapeze elements in the video. How did they come to be?

JB: I'm kind of a lunatic that way. When I made Back in the Circus, the song "Back in the Circus" was the first one that was finished. And it really set the tone for the record. And exploring that trapeze girl circus carnie chick character was--I don't know, I've always been kind of partial to her, whoever she is. I think she was a character I danced once, when I was a dancer. And I just thought I'd revisit her, and why not make the art of the album reflect that particular character and the whimsy and intimacy of the sound of that song? It was all sort of part of this, "Okay, this is going to be a real theme." So I went to trapeze school on the West Side Highway.

PM: Of course.

JB: And I learned how to do trapeze.

PM: Wow.

JB: I went with Pat, actually. He did it, too.

PM: He did it too!

JB: Yes, he did it. He was awesome. I went to trapeze school. We sort of practiced for a day to see if it was even going to be feasible. And then my friend Linda [Hansen] the photographer, since we didn't have any dough, she said, "Hey, how about if we just get you a free ticket from your miles, come to New York, and we'll take some pictures and see what happens?" So we went to trapeze school, and she took some pictures. And I broke my back, and we got some great stuff.

PM: Wow. That's really amazing. I thought "Deny" was a fantastic song--

JB: Oh!

PM: --particular to this DVD, right?

JB: Yep.

PM: That you wrote for a Christopher Reeves directed film, In the Gloaming?

JB: Right.

PM: What a shame that it was not included, ultimately, in that movie. It seems so right.

JB: It was so tailored--I mean, obviously, I read the script, and I was blown away, and in tears. And I thought, all right, well, I'm the one to write this song. And it was one of those gift songs, it was finished in twenty minutes--

PM: Wow.

JB: --because the material was so powerful and the character was so clear, and the voice just was there.

PM: How did the script come to you, the hook-up?

JB: There was this really cool producer in Boston. I was living in Boston at the time. And his name was Nick Paleologos. He was working for public television in Boston. And he was a fan. And he called me up and said, "Hey, I have this project, and I think you're probably right for it."

PM: Wow.

JB: Number one because I had done that song "In the Gloaming" on The Angel in the House.

PM: Right.

JB: And he was thinking of using that as well. But he wanted me to write an original song for the movie. And so I did. And I think that Christopher Reeves ended up having his wife sing "In the Gloaming," which was cool. I'm not going to argue with that. So I understood them not using my version of "Gloaming." But it kind of sucked that they didn't use my song. [laughs]

PM: Yes.

JB: Because I thought it was just really so poignant.

PM: Did you meet Reeves along the way?

JB: I did. I met him. We drove out to his house in western Mass., and had a really nice meeting with him, and talked about the vibe of the song and the movie. I mean, it was really cool to have met him at all.

PM: So you met him after you wrote "Deny"?

JB: I can't remember what the sequence was. I think I may have met him before I finished it.

PM: Right. So you don't know what his personal reaction to the song was?

JB: I don't, at all. I know that Nick was knocked out

PM: Yeah, it's a great song.

JB: But for whatever reason, it didn't get used. But I got to use it.

PM: Yeah. And now your fans have it, which is great.

JB: Yeah, now my fans have it. I mean, whether or not one knows the story behind it, I think it speaks to any kind of communication block between a child and a parent.

PM: Yeah, I mean regardless of why it specifically was conceived, it's still a good movie pitch for various scenarios.

JB: Yeah.

PM: Absolutely. That still may find a cinematic home.

JB: I'm hoping, I'm thinking, I'm praying.

PM: [laughs] Did you get very involved in the editing phase of this project, or just let it go?

JB: I'd let it go, and then I would come back, because no one wants to have someone over his or her shoulder.

PM: Right. On the other hand, no one can you give you exactly what you want just off the bat, either.

JB: Right.

PM: You got to say, "Hmm, how about a little less of this, a little more of that..."

JB: Right. Luckily, there just wasn't a lot of work with, so Emily didn't have a ton of choices for editing. So it's just amazing that she did what she did with the dearth of good footage that we had, and how cogent it all is. Because these people had never seen a show before, they just were doing us a favor. They came in and they stood there. It wasn't as if anything had been rehearsed. There was no one directing it. There was no sort of central guy saying, "Okay, camera four, up. Okay, two."

PM: It wasn't like that?

JB: No, not at all.

PM: Holy jeez. That's amazing that you got what you got, then.

JB: Yeah, exactly.

PM: And were people literally standing there? Were some people on the move, or just Maceo, the steadicam guy?

JB: The steadicam guy, he was the only one moving--and Blake, of course.

[laughter]

JB: That's Blake, constantly moving.

PM: He was out in the hall and so forth.

JB: He was in the hall. He had the camera like duct taped to a broomstick so he could hold it up high over the drummer's head.

PM: [laughs] That's funny.

JB: Little Blakey, he was our hero.

PM: That's great. I thought one really brilliant stroke, though, in the editing was to cut back and forth from the performance to the black and white rehearsal of the song, at the very same point in the song.

JB: Yeah, that was Emily. I mean, she's incredibly musical. Somehow she crawled through all these gazillion tapes that Blake had made at rehearsal, and she found those moments where she could match it up, even though there was no click.

PM: Yeah, I mean, she'd lock it right up, to the frame.

JB: She's amazing. And where it was at all off, I could come in and say, "Okay, you need to go a couple frames this way or that way." But with Emily, there wasn't a lot of direction from me, she was really had a sense of what worked and what didn't. And the songs that just didn't have enough footage, we didn't include them, where it was too boring, or when we were missing a gap of anything that was working. So, pretty much it was the video coverage that decided whether songs were included or not.

PM: That's just how it goes, yeah.

JB: On a couple of songs, there was a train wreck, or I was just so out of tune that we couldn't include it.

PM: Everything that did get included, I was happy to hear that everything was in such good tune. God bless those guitar techs.

JB: God bless us all.   continue

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