Life’s twists and turns can certainly sometimes bring sadness and loss, but they can also deliver satisfying rewards and success, especially if your personality builds upon imagination, determination, and perseverance. Singer Jonatha Brooke is the perfect example of an artist who is able to navigate life’s roads, secure in her abilities to avoid oncoming traffic, and possessing the courage to drive straight through roadblocks, if necessary.

Brooke’s talents behind the wheel also include merging with the best of them as she leads us to the intersection where pop, folk and rock, link head on and learn to live in harmony. (Harmony, of course, being one of the towns Brooke often pulls into, where the entire population is pleased to stand along Main Street and cheer.)

Here is an artist in the true sense of the word because her choice is to not repeat herself, but to constantly flee her comfort zone in search of unexplored, fertile territory. Her most recent release, The Works, demonstrates in her willingness to experiment. Invited by Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s daughter, Brooke was allowed the time to investigate, select, and, perhaps more importantly, fall in love with Woody and the thousands of lyrics, poems, and ideas he had left behind. Upon making her choices, she then had the luxury to take copies home where in her private writing room, she would compose the melodies to Woody’s never before heard words. This was where her sanctuary of music was born.

Jonatha’s recording career has run the gamut from indie label to major label and back again to indie. Currently she is signed to her own label, Bad Dog Records. Its first release in 1999 was Jonatha Brooke Live. Her ever-expanding fan base, due in part to her shrewdness with the Internet and imaginative self-promotion, helped make Bad Dog Records the continuing success it is today.

The big screen and small also have cultivated a love affair with the JB sound. In 2002, Disney’s Return to Neverland soundtrack featured “I’ll Try,” an original song as well as a cover, “The Second Star to the Right,” showcasing her goal of reaching an all age group audience. For television, Brooke penned the tune “What You Don’t Know,” which was used as the theme for the hit series Dollhouse.

But her key ingredient to continued success in the music business is the ability to cultivate and nurture close relationships within the industry. Drummer Steve Gadd, keyboard player Joe Sample, guitarist John Leventhal, and producer Bob Clearmountain are just a few of the types of talent riding shotgun with Brooke on her highway. These relationships help create a fabric for her career that is not so much a safety net – something she prefers to work without — but more so a blanket of encouragement, wrapping her in the warmth of her music.

GALO: How much did you enjoy the Lincoln Center American Songbook show this past January, which celebrated Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday and your album The Works?

Jonatha Brooke: It was the first gig I had done in a very long time. For the last year and a half, my almost full time job has been caring for my mother. So this was a big outing for me — a big honor, and I was very aware of how important it was to be launching the 100th year of Woody’s birth. Also, it was Lincoln Center, and I had 50 friends coming from all over the country because they thought it was a big deal too and wanted to support me. I was really nervous. I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness that backdrop of Central Park and that room is more formal than a lot of the rooms I play.’ I wanted it to be bang-up incredible, and it turned out really well. I had an amazing band; they were tremendous. [The show] was sold out, and we got a really lovely review in The [New York] Times, so for my one gig out in a year-and-a-half, it was actually a huge success for me.

GALO: In Stephen Holden’s review in The New York Times, he said that your voice “hovers on the edge of a sob…” What did you think about that?

JB: It sounds so over-dramatic, but I guess there are times when I use my voice as a dramatic amplification of the lyrics. I do tend to use my full range, so that if I’m really getting to a lyrical climax of a song, then I will push my voice to its limit and it will sound emotional — it will almost break, and I think that’s just part of my dramatic leaning.

GALO: I think that’s good.

JB: Yeah. I mean, I didn’t take it as an insult. [Laughs]

GALO: Did Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s daughter, happen to make that show?

JB: Oh, yeah. She was there with her husband, and her daughter, and the woman who runs the Woody Guthrie archives. They’ve become good friends in the three years since I made the record. They were just dumbfounded, psyched, and goofy backstage. We had a really nice time afterward.

GALO: I was always a fan of Arlo Guthrie.

JB: I grew up listening to “Alice’s Restaurant.” That was at the top of the list at our house.

GALO: You have said how amazing it was having access to the Woody archives to search through the lyrics and poems so that you could write music for them, and that you felt you could find some of yourself in his words. I wondered, if you ever had the opportunity to try to write in the actual archives, or if you did all you writing at home or in another place? Your melodies strike me as so fine that I thought perhaps Woody was whispering in your ear.

JB: Well, he was definitely whispering in my ear, but I didn’t need to be in the archives for that to happen. In fact, I’m very paranoid when I’m in writing mode, so I have to shut myself off completely and pray that no one is listening to my steps and falters. I do believe he was very much in the room somehow because these melodies came effortlessly. [The archives were] just like a candy store, so I spent a couple of weeks going there, almost like a full time job, just pouring through his notebooks and all of the folders of his song lyrics. I picked and chose my favorites and they gave them to me on a CD, so I could bring them home and really delve in, and that’s when the magic started happening, once I got it in my sequestered room.

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