Secretly Canadian owes JD Salinger royalties
It hopefully goes without saying that JD Salinger’s influence reached far & wide. It sure reached us here in the Midwest. Upon learning about his death at age 91 a few moments ago, one of the first thoughts that came to mind (alongside a general sense of ennui) was this line from The Catcher in the Rye:
I don’t know about bores. Maybe you shouldn’t feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don’t hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they’re secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me.
From the moment I first read it in the 10th grade, that line never left my head. What a quintessentially Salinger way to look at life! On one hand feeling a general sense of adversity and “otherness” in the world, while on the other hand there was a genuine inclusiveness and yearning to embrace said differences and suss out the common threads which bond us. I became rather obsessed with the notion that there were “secretly terrific whistlers” among us, or secretly terrific anything for that matter. This sense of wonder made its way into our ongoing joke about the subtle aesthetic and psychological differences between Americans and Canadians, and from that sprung forth the oft-used term “secretly Canadian.” When trying to decide on a name for our new record label a few years later, this recurring phrase ended up feeling like the least specific of the options while also — buried deep within it — feeling like a Salinger-like take on our taste in music, which ran the gamut from outsider sounds to populist hits. We were interested in artists that were informed by a sense of otherness and adversity in the world while also couldn’t shake our love for artists who were unabashed in their desire to create songs that could be enjoyed by the masses. If only we had foreseen the incredible puns that would come our way through the years as a result naming the label Secretly Canadian, we maybe would have instead gone with Jellyhand Records… Ok, probably not.
Thank you for your gift of words, JD. We’re all the richer for it.