Fred again.. & Brian Eno — Secret Life | Full Vinyl Session + The Voices Inside It
Secret Life — played in full, vinyl, start to finish. Eleven tracks. Made by two next-door neighbours forty-four years apart, from voice notes and phone recordings passed back and forth through lockdown. Recording began on 4 April 2020. Three days later, one of the voices inside it died.
The session opens without words. Around the album — the records it was built from, restored to full length, and the man who invented this music bookending his own life across forty-five years.
Secret Life by Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Listening Sequence
Total runtime approx. 1 hr 45.
Thank you for Listening
Rafi Mercer - Founder of Tracks & Tales
TRACKLIST
OPENING TRACK
01 1/1 — Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports (EG, 1978)
Conceived at Cologne Bonn airport, where Eno couldn't bear music being played at people who might be flying for the last time. Seventeen minutes, tape loops of different lengths drifting out of phase so the piece never repeats. The sleevenotes coined the word ambient.
SIDE A
SECRET LIFE
02 I Saw You — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
It builds steadily and then simply stops, trailing off rather than resolving. Eno has said watching Fred cut loops like this changed the way he listens to music.
SECRET LIFE
03 Secret — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
The track the album is named after, carrying a Leonard Cohen interpolation buried so deep in the processing that most listeners never place it.
04 In My Secret Life — Leonard Cohen - Ten New Songs (Columbia, 2001)
Cohen spent five years as an ordained monk at the Mount Baldy Zen Center and came down in his mid-sixties. This record was written with Sharon Robinson and largely made in her home studio. He speaks more than he sings on it.
SECRET LIFE
05 Radio — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
Warped vocals over shimmering synths and distant piano. John Prine's voice is inside it, unidentifiable — Fred doesn't sample to quote, he samples to keep something.
SECRET LIFE
06 Follow — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
The pace stays glacial. Aaron Dessner, Buddy Ross, Eyelar, Leif Vollebekk and Joy Anonymous all carry production credits across the record.
SECRET LIFE
07 Enough — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
The album's largest moment — orchestral tones assembled rather than recorded from any orchestra. Everyone who has tried to describe it ends up reaching for the record that follows.
08 The Plateaux of Mirror — Harold Budd & Brian Eno - Ambient 2 (EG, 1980)
Budd had nearly given up composing when Eno asked him to record. He played piano while Eno treated it live without telling him what he was doing — Budd said he heard his own playing come back as something he hadn't written. Exactly the arrangement between Eno and Fred, forty-three years on.
SECRET LIFE
09 Pause — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
Side one closes. Exactly what its title says — the album stopping to breathe before turning over.
THE TURN
10 Summer's End — John Prine - The Tree of Forgiveness (Oh Boy, 2018)
Prine was a Chicago postman who wrote songs on his delivery round. He survived cancer twice; the first surgery permanently altered his voice. This was his first album of new songs in thirteen years, and its refrain asks someone to come home and not be alone. He died of COVID-19 on 7 April 2020 — three days after work on Secret Life began.
SIDE B
SECRET LIFE
11 Safety — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
Side two opens more gently than side one. This is where the album becomes genuinely ambient rather than slowed-down dance music.
SECRET LIFE
12 Cmon — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
Ebbing and flowing between warm pads and tremolo vocal fragments.
SECRET LIFE
13 Trying — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
Eno's method takes over — reduction, space, patience, the sense that what matters is what has been left out.
14 This Is How We Walk on the Moon — Arthur Russell - Another Thought (Point Music, 1994)
A classically trained cellist who moved between the downtown avant-garde, disco and folk song, recording obsessively and releasing almost nothing. He died in 1992, aged forty; this was assembled from his tapes two years later. Voice and cello through delay — fragments, held and repeated.
SECRET LIFE
15 Chest — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
The penultimate track, and the last quiet ground before the record closes.
SECRET LIFE
16 Come On Home — Fred again.. & Brian Eno - Secret Life (Text, 2023)
The second Prine interpolation, and the album's title taken directly from his line. The record ends by repeating what it started with — two and a half years and one death later.
CLOSING TRACK
17 An Ending (Ascent) — Brian Eno - Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (EG, 1983)
Written with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno for a documentary that used NASA footage with no narration at all — just the film and the music. The session opened with Eno in 1978 inventing a music that could hold a room. It closes with Eno in 1983, scoring the emptiest place human beings have ever been.
