Joan Armatrading
Secret Secrets

If there were only one Joan Armatrading album to choose, I would pick this one. With SECRET SECRETS, our Joan, then thirty-five, reaches the heights of expressiveness and writing ability, signing all the songs. The result is an album well-balanced in rhythms, which excellently highlights the chiaroscuro of her contralto voice.

Right from the first track, “Persona Grata” (a strange title that hints at a Latin definition), the album's recurring theme is perceived, which is the classic—and for her usual—sorrows and joys of love: “Make me feel good / It can make you feel good too” thus “Fammi stare bene / vedrai che puoi stare bene anche tu” and then it goes on rhyming across the remaining 9 tracks.

Unlike the rock-blues setup of her early works, here we find a more sophisticated orchestration, and a shift towards trendy pop with a vaguely new-wave feel. It's no coincidence that the producer is Mike Howlett, who in those same years had already brought success to groups like Berlin and OMD, and among the support musicians are big names like Joe Jackson on piano (an excellent solo accompanist on “Love By You”), and then Pino Palladino on bass, Mel Gaynor on drums, and Dave Bitelli on sax (his solo in the bridge of “Friends Not Lovers” is not bad).

Among my favorite songs, I'd include the lively “Temptation” among the more upbeat ones beside “Thinking Man” for more intimate tracks and as the best overall, the heartfelt “Strange” that closes the album with disillusioned melancholy (“Strange / How the real stories end / No happy ever after / No beginning again” which is, more or less, “Curioso / come davvero finiscano le storie d’amore / Senza mai un lieto fine / E neppure un nuovo inizio”).

The iconographic part is very detailed, played on the alternation of red and blue colors (passion and melancholy, I would say) and virtually integrating the ✓ symbol to graphically imitate the italic initial J of the name Joan. The beautiful photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe on the front and back cover, as well as in the inner folder, are a kind of extra bonus. The lyrics for every song are included, along with a detailed indication of the musical collaborations. In short, an album that truly has everything necessary to stand out in every enthusiast’s collection.