Brand names are like decorative doorbells in the world of record labels. If they look cool and ring nicely, then they do their job. Only some open into deeper ideas that resonate. Secretly Canadian is one of the finest examples.
Coined by a gang of Midwestern college friends, the term began as a private joke wrapped in a nonsensical riddle. From the shock of discovering that Neil Young, The Band and Joni Mitchell were not actually American, ‘secretly Canadian’ became their own Wayne’s World mutation of the hidden righteous concept. You didn’t have to be actually Canadian, nor did you have to be an artist. If you were a natural born outsider able to see straight through mainstream America, you were secretly Canadian.
The time and the place were the mid-90s in a college town called Bloomington, Indiana. With a population of 120,000, a third of them students, Bloomington was, as it is today, an unlikely place to house America’s biggest and arguably hippest indie label. But in the internet age, geographical remoteness is clearly no longer the logistical handicap it used to be.