Secret Book, Revisited

“Secret Book” was the featured track last time around on this site, and it’s the featured track this time around, too. Only Lori and I have added vocals in this version, which probably wraps up the production on this track.

This version is a rough mix, so there may still be some further tweaking here and there during subsequent mixing sessions, but otherwise it’s substantially finished.

So I thought I might use this post to try to offer some insight into what the song is all about (or at least, what it meant to me when I was writing it). Conventional wisdom holds that artists should avoid discussing the meanings of their own work, but I hate conventional wisdom, so I’m going to do it anyway.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that, when I first came up with the idea for this song, I was watching the History Channel (which Lori and I like to call “The Hitler Channel,” for reasons obvious to anyone who’s ever flipped through a cable channel guide or tried to watch a few hours of that channel’s typical daytime programming).

I’m not really a big fan of the History Channel because, in my experience, it doesn’t tend to offer the most nuanced treatments of its subjects. It’s omissions and simplifications are understandable, of course—the History Channel is meant for a general interest audience, not for academics and other fastidious types. And historical realities are often anything but simple, spawning endless, tiresome debates among those who pay too much attention to such things.

Still, on this particular occasion, Lori and I were watching a History Channel special on the subject of apocryphal or otherwise non-canonical Christian and Old Testament scriptures—the Book of Judas, the Book of James, the Apocrypha of John, etc.

As someone with a longstanding interest in the early history of Christianity (in particular, the many obscure Christian and pre-Christian traditions that were formerly all lumped together under the now dubious taxonomic designation “Gnosticism”), I couldn’t help but watch despite my reservations.

As expected, the show didn’t get off on the best foot, setting for itself the redundant task of debunking a series of straw-men arguments patched together to make an ungainly Frankenstein’s monster of popular religious conspiracy myths (a la “The Da Vinci Code”), while somehow neatly skirting the more compelling and real controversies that keep religious history buffs up at night.

But it did get me started thinking, about my own personal fascination with mystery religions and early Christianity and about the popular fascination, in general, with religions of both the orthodox and unorthodox persuasions. And somehow in the process of thinking about these things, I wrote the lyrics and melody to “Secret Book.”

The lyrics began as an attempt to personalize the canonical and non-canonical Judeo-Christian scriptures by re-envisioning them as a diary into which God—assuming the lesser, degraded form of Man—confesses to lies, acts of cruelty, and other moral failings. (Some of the early Judeo-Christian mystery traditions hold Man to be identical with God in a way roughly analogous to the way the Vedas hold Brahman to be identical with Atman.)

The general idea behind the song is something like this: When the speaker first peeks inside Man’s “Secret Book”, she expects to find frightening and terrible revelations—the darkest secrets of Creation revealed, the wickedest desires in the heart of Man laid bare—within those pages. But instead, she finds that Man’s written confessions have already been expunged in their entirety from the pages of the “Secret Book” through the very acts of self-reflection that created the book in the first place, leaving behind, paradoxically, nothing but a dusty collection of blank pages.

The twist to the song (“So imagine my surprise / There was not a word inside”) alludes elliptically to the non-canonical Apocalypse of Peter, which reveals that even the worst among the damned souls in Hell aren’t really condemned to Hell for eternity, as prevailing Christian dogma maintains, but that they too eventually attain redemption and ascend to Heaven. (This is known as the doctrine of Universal Salvation to some.) In this way, the sins to which Man confesses in the “Secret Book,” have been wiped clean.

Now of course, all this pretentious, quasi-mystical mumbo-jumbo shouldn’t discourage anyone from coming to the song from a completely different angle of their own.

As I was writing it, I was also aware that another interpretation of the lyrics might just take the “secret book” at face value, as a diary or personal journal, which the speaker mistakenly believes catalogs the book’s rightful owner's many secret transgressions and indiscretions. Unable to resist the urge to see these sordid, private confessions, she “peeks inside,” but finds no such confessions contained within the pages of the book, leaving her to grapple with the guilty knowledge that she acted in bad faith, and her suspicions were unwarranted.

Either of these interpretations works just fine for me. There are surely many interpretations I haven’t even considered.

But that’s the beauty of a pop song: It doesn’t matter what the songwriter meant to say. All that matters is that it sticks in your head. So here’s hoping this one sinks in nice and deep.

Lori’s vocals turned out beautifully, as always. These are the first new vocal tracks she’s recorded with me in over three years. And I’m so glad to finally have her back working with me on this project.

Next assignment: Recording Lori’s vocals for “Left Hand/Right Hand.” I’m excited about this new one. It’s a Blondie-style disco-punk song. I play a ridiculous guitar solo on it. Can’t wait.

Click here to download the latest mix of "Secret Book."

(Note: Updated the MP3 with a new corrected rough mix on March 3, 2008.)