MAY 20, 1994

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 17

ENTERTAINMENT

A talk with the Story

by Greg Varner

Jonatha Brooke and Jennifer Kimball met as students at Amherst College over a dozen years ago and have been singing together ever since. Their two albums on Elektra Records, Grace in Gravity and The Angel in the House, are collections of intelligent and graceful pop songs written by Brooke, who also sings and plays guitar. She and Kimball, who sings and plays various percussion instruments, talk easily with each other, sometimes interrupting one another to finish a sentence or add qualification or crack a joke.

"What's different about what we do," Brooke said, "is unusual harmonies that cross and flip around and land on the unexpected." Brooke and Kimball agreed to this talk after their concert at Oberlin College late last month.

Greg Varner: Could we start by talking about your large queer following? Jonatha Brooke: It's so great!

Jennifer Kimball: Incredibly great! Brooke: It's so strong and so attentive and the response is really passionate. That's like a sure thing at any gig.

Kimball: Especially women. It's been great. I don't know how else to describe it. Women just totally get it and they're psyched for us and in general it's an explosive response.

Brooke: And that's because a lot of the songs really speak for things that gay women are totally in tune with and addressing daily, that maybe straight women aren't quite as sensitive to, because they're not hitting them every day.

Kimball: I think that the beauty of Jonatha's particular writing style is that there's this space for anyone to come in and feel whatever it is that moves them. “Long Song" for example, or any song, is not women and men specifically. that's what makes the songs interesting and makes them feel so universal.

Can you talk a little bit about your writing process, Jonatha?

Brooke: More often than not, if I'm actually going to finish something, the guitar part comes first and then the words will feed in around it, or be smooshed and forced into place. I have twenty journals going at the moment: all these different notebooks, scattered pages and napkins and things of ideas, and for me it's like a jigsaw puzzle where one day, all of a sudden, page umpteen and napkin three will be the same song-okay, this goes here, and this goes with this guitar part that I've had for three months. I'm always singing melodies over and over again, things I have going that might not be finished. Sometimes in my sleep. I'll wake up and there'll be a whole song there. Usually I'll forget it. That's really a bummer, dreaming a whole song and then waking up and realizing I've lost it. With "The Angel in the House" I had the first line for a long time before I could finish the song: "My mother moved the furniture when she no longer moved the man, We thought nothing of it at the time." I was really frightened to use it. I thought it would be too hurtful. I asked my brother about it and he said, "No, you definitely can't use it, she's in too fragile a state right now." She was just divorced, it was a big mess. My brothers and I found out all sorts of stuff about my mom that we had no idea about, things that had gone on in my parents' lives. So it was really a tough time for everybody, but the song would not be written any other way. I kept trying to make it into another song and talk about something else. I talked to my mother very vaguely about it. I said that the song was definitely not just about her, but about all sorts of stuff. She told one of my brothers, "Boy, Jonatha really remembers things differently than I do." But c'est la vie. She's a poet, my dad's a journalist, and I think they understand the relationship between fiction and reality, and how

you meld them all together.

Now that we've worked with the band for a while, I guess I think more with them in mind. As I'm writing I'll have, maybe not the whole arrangement in mind, but certain things...I think in harmony-Jennifer and I are both drawn to harmony, that's what drew us together in the first place—but I'm starting to think about the band as well.

Talk more about how the two of you got together.

Kimball: I've definitely always loved singing weird stuff along with other people's songs, and that was the fun of meeting Jonatha in college, because we found we both loved to really screw up songs that we heard on the radio. When we heard contemporary pop songs we'd sing them a half-step off, in a different key the whole way through, so every single note was dissonant, and that was always a lot of fun.

But I think looking back on the work that we did then, it's hard to hear. I think just now, in the last few years, we're really singing everything close to what's right. It's always been fun to do, but it's really hard to sing perfectly. There are moments when it's really great. And I think we both know that it can be done perfectly, so when it isn't exactly right, it's really hard to deal with it.

Brooke: But we're getting there. Wherever "there" is.

How did you end up calling yourselves the Story?

Kimball: We met in 1981, and sang together in lots of different formations and groups. We started doing concerts and for years we just called ourselves Jonatha and Jennifer, and then when the first album came out, it was going to be kind of final and permanent, on a CD. We had tried to change our name before that, but it just hadn't happened.

Brooke: At the time it sort of hit me at a toll booth, it had no significance at all. I'd been really racking my brain trying to think of a name for us, then at the toll booth, the Story was the one thing I didn't toss out immediately.

Well, your songs are deeply imagined miniature stories, and somebody speculated in print somewhere that your name connects to that fact.

Brooke: Yeah, I think that after it happened, it definitely made sense. These songs are like stories. It's not just "Oooh, baby,

YEAH YEAH...

... AND THIS CUTE LITTLE CINCHED WAIST... IT WAS ENTRANCING I TELL YOU, SIMPLY ENTRANCING

...IM SURE HELL LOOK GREAT IN IT," BUT CAN WE JUST PLEASE STICK TO THE SUBJECT FROM HERE ON OUT?

?? QUEER NATION??

YOU KNOW, KIND OF THE HIP, HAPPENING THING OF THE MOMENT...I DON'T LIKE HIP AND HAPPENING THINGS... THEY HAVE THIS WAY OF TURNING ON YOU....

HMMM....

BOY QUEER NATION. THEY SURE SEEM TO HAVE FIZZLED OUT HUH? I CAN'T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I HEARD-

Jennifer Kimball (left) and Jonatha Brooke

baby, I miss you, I love you, I wanna boink you."

Kimball: That's a new song! "I Wanna Boink You"!

Brooke: OK, I'll get to work. What do you do when you're not being the Story?

Kimball: Last year I had a garden. Not this year. We've been on the road pretty solidly since last June. There haven't been more than a few days at a time at home. I like to ride my bicycle. I'm an avid cyclist. My husband's really into cycling. And I was a graphic designer before I got into this fulltime. We both had other careers till about three or four years ago, when we had to start slowly getting rid of them and spending

more and more time on music. So I work on my computer doing design work. And I actually try not to sing too much. I like to get into other stuff, because it becomes so intense and it's healthy to have another life.

Brooke: I'm on the phone. For my thirtieth birthday, I got a phone headset, because-

Kimball: You spend like ten hours a day on the phone.

Brooke: I'm the kind of person who likes to be involved in every aspect of this career. I like to know what's going on and know all the people involved and be in charge and not let anything slip through, so I'm conse-

WHAT SUBJECT?

THE SUBJECT OF ME / AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SORRY STATE OF MY WARDROBE! IT'S A CRISIS SITUATION!

huh. Some fashion muse you turned out

to be.....

-DID YOU TRY LOOKING THROUGH THAT "HIM" CATALOGUE THEY SENT

YOU? SAYS IT'S FOR, THE "OUT-GOING MAN...

00000!

Look AT

THE DUDE IN THE THONG

ON PAGE 14.

(PANT)

OH REALLY? AS I RECALL EVE TRIED GIVING YOU LOTS OF HELPFUL HINTS, BUT YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME!

SIZZLING SEMINUDE

SHOT

OH THIS

DID YOU SEE THE CLOTHES IN HERE??

LIKE WHAT?

MELANIE ACEVEDO

quently on the phone, which sort of sucks, but I guess I wouldn't have it any other way. Do you encounter a lot of resistance being a strong woman in control?

Brooke: Sound men. Heterosexual sound men. You get to clubs, the sound men are assholes, and they have a problem dealing with women who know what they want in the monitor, in the house, and you can imagine being a bitch. Of course you'd be a bitch if someone was being a pain in the butt, if you'd had a long drive, you had three weeks on the road, you hadn't slept enough, you didn't have time to go to the hotel before the sound check, and the sound man was a jerk. Of course you'd be a bitch, and if you were a guy you wouldn't get any flack for it. So it is hard being a strong woman, and I think we're so gracious. We make such an effort to be nice at all costs, at all times, and sometimes just feel like screaming at people because they're such dicks.

Kimball: I understand completely, because I can't handle it at all. I mean, Jonatha has a much larger tolerance for this sort of thing-

Brooke: For bullshit.

Kimball: Well, yeah, you have a gift for continuing to get what you want but be

LIKE THE CALVIN KLEIN UNDERWEAR?

OH RIGHT-AT 12 BUCKS A POP? NO THANK YOU!

HEY THEY'RE SEXY!

YEAH, AND HE'S A TOTAL CLOSET CASE

...BUT WHAT REALLY KILLS ME ABOUT THIS THING

THING? (HYUK) THOUGH IS THAT MOST OF THESE CLOTHES WON'T LOOK DECENT ON ANYONE OTHER THAN BODY-BUILDING MALE MODELS ANYWAY!

"THE TRANSLUCENT SILVERY ROBE WRAPS

YOU IN PURE GLEAM (SNICKER)

THE MODELS IN HERE ARE PRETTY

HOT STUFF THOUGH I SUPPOSE I

COULD USE THIS FOR MASTURABATORY PURPOSES AT LEAST....

H.1.M

TOO!

Continued on Page 20

WELL THEN WHAT ABOUT THESE FREEDOM RINGS I TRIED TO GIVE YOU ??

WELL THAT WAS VERY THOUGHTFUL OF YOU ACTUALLY

..BUT I'M

NOT REALLY MUCH INTO ACCESSORIZATION.. I'VE GOT A WHOLE DRAWER FULL OF PINK TRIANGLES AND BUTTONS THAT I NEVER WEAR... BESIDES, THOSE RINGS ARE SO....QUEER NATION OR SOMETHING...

-WHICH BRINGS ME TO MY NEXT POINT. HOWRE YOU EVER GOING TO WEAR ANYTHING IN STYLE UNTIL YOU SPRING FOR A HEALTH CLUB MEMBERSHIP...?

UH...

HOW ABOUT

I GET THE DAMN

UNDERWEAR AND RINGS INSTEAD?

FASHION:

IT'S NEVER ENOUGH TO KEEP UP.