At Jon Coombs’ wedding in 2017, Angel Olsen performed her song “Some Things Cosmic.” Several years prior, it was the first song by the singer-songwriter that Coombs had ever heard, and it was, he recalls, “a true game-changer for me, personally.” It was a game-changer for Olsen, too: After Coombs heard it, the A&R executive signed her to the Secretly Group sublabel Jagjaguwar.
As vp of A&R for Secretly Group — which, in addition to Jagjaguwar, encompasses Dead Oceans, Secretly Canadian, Saddest Factory Records and Secretly Publishing — Coombs has shaped the face of indie music today from Olsen, his first signee, through many others now including Mitski, Faye Webster and Mustafa.
It all might’ve seemed unlikely for Coombs, now 38, who as a kid growing up in southern Indiana pored over the thank-you’s in the liner notes of the CDs he bought with his allowance. “I was just like, ‘OK, sure, Mom and Dad.’ But then it was like, ‘Everyone at label name,’ ” he says. “That’s when I started to connect the dots — there’s labels. I started getting fascinated with label culture.”
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He first noticed Bloomington, Ind.-based Secretly Canadian on the back of The Impossible Shapes’ 2003 album, We Like It Wild, and ended up interning at Secretly Distribution while a student at Indiana University. A series of pivotal events followed: Shortly before Coombs graduated, Bon Iver released the seminal For Emma, Forever Ago on Jagjaguwar (already affiliated with Secretly Canadian; the Secretly Group moniker would come later); a key employee on Secretly Group’s small staff departed; and Coombs landed a job there. He hasn’t left.
Back then, Coombs wore “a lot of hats” — something he still points to as a benefit of working at an indie label, for those starting out in the industry — but once he moved to New York in 2010 to open the label’s office in the city, he gravitated toward project management, A&R and synch licensing. In the mid-2010s, Coombs was also heavily involved in launching Secretly’s publishing division. But regardless of his role or which artist on the label group’s eclectic roster he’s working with, Coombs says his guiding principle has been “championing the unobvious.”
Today, Secretly’s artists are among the indie world’s most visible. Phoebe Bridgers recently opened dates on Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, genre-melding trio Khruangbin plays to sizable crowds around the world, and Mitski and Webster both went viral on TikTok in 2023. (Mitski’s “My Love Mine All Mine” spent a record six weeks atop the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart last fall.) “It shows that maybe there’s room for more voices — for more adventurous music in the mainstream,” Coombs says when reflecting on the label group’s crossover successes. “Audiences are excited for adventurous songwriters — and that’s what we excel at.”
—Eric Renner Brown
