Jonatha Brooke
Folk-pop singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke, who was born in Chicago in 1964 but moved to the Boston suburbs with her family before she was a year old, clearly remembers the wide range of music her older brothers were putting on the turntable long before she got a guitar. She says she heard everything from Joni Mitchell to The Who, but the first song she taught herself when her father gave her a guitar for Christmas when she was 12 was America’s “A Horse with No Name.”
The Story, Grace in Gravity, The Angel in the House
By the time she was in seventh grade, she was playing in a band called Science Function. During her freshman year at Amherst College in 1981, two important things happened: first, she discovered The Roches and began experimenting with open tuning to get some of their sounds; second, she met singer-guitarist Jennifer Kimball at an audition for the college a cappella group, The Sabrinas, which resulted in the pair forming the harmony-drenched folk duo Jonatha & Jennifer, which morphed into The Story.
Brooke’s first stab at songwriting was during her sophomore year at Amherst, when an assignment to put original music to any e.e. cummings poem became The Story’s song “Love Is More Thicker Than Forget.” The duo moved to Boston after college, recorded a demo called Over Oceans that landed them a deal with Green Linnet Records and recorded their first album, 1991’s Grace in Gravity. After signing with Elektra, they cut 1993’s The Angel in the House.
Going solo, Becoming a multi-instrumentalist, Film/television
Kimball left the duo to work at a publishing firm while their third LP, Plumb, was taking shape, and it became a Brooke solo project. Several more solo albums followed, with many tunes featuring folkie ideas accompanied by jazzy chords. Brooke, who was working at a dance company but left to concentrate on guitar, singing and writing, turned herself into a multi-instrumentalist by learning piano, mandolin and kalimba.
Along with her original material, Brooke has recorded covers of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and The Beatles’ “Across the Universe,” among others, and, with the blessing of his daughter Nora, put original music to some of Woody Guthrie’s unpublished lyrics for her 2008 album The Works. She’s co-written songs with Katy Perry and The Courtyard Hounds, written for four Disney films – including Return To Neverland, where she wrote and sang “I’ll Try” and sang the opening song, “Second Star To The Right” – and has written material for a variety of television shows (including the theme song for the series Dollhouse).
Musicals, Recent albums, Kitchen Covid Concert Series
After taking time off from her career to care for her ailing mother, Brooke returned to the scene in 2014 with a highly celebrated, off-Broadway production of her one-woman musical, “My Mother Has 4 Noses.” The story-filled show chronicles her relationship with her mom while she was battling Alzheimer’s disease. Its 12-week run at the Duke Theater on 42nd Street in New York City opened the door to a new creative outlet in the theater world and since its opening, Brooke has been tapped to co-write more musicals: “Death and Venice” and “Hopper” with Anton Dudley; “Quadroon” with the late Joe Sample; “Switched” with Geoffrey Nauffts; and “Tempus” with Jaclyn Backhaus.
After 16 years in New York City, in the fall of 2016, Jonatha relocated to Minneapolis, recorded and released her EP Imposter, received a prestigious McKnight Artist Grant, and an International Independent Songwriting award for material from her 2016 album Midnight. Hallelujah. When Covid struck in 2020, she began livestreaming concerts on Facebook and YouTube from her kitchen – the Kitchen Covid Concert Series, as she called it – every Monday afternoon. The silver lining to the pandemic’s losses, she said, is that every week is its own world tour because people tune in from every corner of the planet. An independent artist since 1999, Brooke released her 11th album, The Sweetwater Sessions, in July 2020 on her label, Bad Dog Records.
