featuring: tony lechmanski guitar, catherine monnes cello, e-fiddle, backing vocals, jordan mancini drums, jeff diehm bass, ethan lipscomb keys
‘the dragon’ video by rich tarbell, featuring deepa de jour and opal lechmanski
‘family ghost’ video by aaron farrington, jessika flint, and abel okugawa, featuring chris estey
‘fast lane’ video by thomas michael smith
‘broken (2017)’ video by aaron farrington and abel okugawa, featuring sally rose monnes and micah consylman
‘a friend for the apocalypse’ video by brian wimer, featuring adventurous charlottesville friends
In 2013, I was living in my hometown and not doing much with music besides some youtube covers, because I was mostly focused on being a parent (my daughter was born in 2008). I've always been good friends with the band Bella Morte (I sang on some of their records) and they are also from my hometown. That summer, they invited me to open for them for a "Best of" album release show at a really nice venue in Charlottesville, the Jefferson Theater.
I put together a band for the show that included Tony Lechmanski (from Bella Morte) on guitar, Jeff Diehm on bass, Catherine Monnes on cello and electric violin, Ethan Lipscomb on keyboards, and Jordan Mancini on drums (who was also playing with Bella Morte for the show). It was a somewhat unlikely cast of characters to find in one band but I think that's what made it special.
We had so much fun preparing for and playing that show, we decided to do more. I had some older songs that had never made it onto albums - Don't Look Back, Sick with Love, The Dragon, and Til it Lasts - and had also been writing a few new ones. Even though these were my songs and ‘my’ band, I got it into my head that we should go by a band name, and I came up with “The Secret Storm”.
We released two EPs under the band name The Secret Storm in 2015 - In the Sun and The Dragon.
Around the same time, my song Broken had been blowing up on Pandora Radio. It had been released on Choreography in 2006 but the algorithm began to smile upon it in about 2011, racking up millions of streams, which led to lots of fan activity online - tumblr posts, lyrics tweets, acoustic covers, etc. It was getting just a huge amount of love, especially for a totally independent/self-released, non-touring artist like me…. So, it was a little stupid that I started releasing music under the name The Secret Storm, when so many people we just discovering “Lauren Hoffman”.
In 2017 we released the album/CD Family Ghost under the augmented band name Lauren Hoffman & The Secret Storm, and in the one artistic concession to marketing that I think I have ever made, we put a new version of Broken on that album too. I say it's a concession because there was no artistic reason to include it - I was just trying to connect this new album to existing fans of the song.
Over the years we were together, we played a lot of shows (pics below), made some cool/fun videos, and made a record that I am still very proud of!
But between the name change and new metadata issues caused by this second version of Broken, the admin and management of the whole thing became a big exhausting problem for me. Leading a band was no easy feat either. Our drummer Jordan had left at some point and I was often scrambling for replacements. There was some drama in 'the scene'/friend groups around us, putting pressure and taking a toll on us too. By the end of 2017 we had disbanded and I was starting work on my next solo album, Mercury Girls.
So, because of all the metadata stuff, Family Ghost is only available in its original form on Bandcamp. But fear not! A slightly different version of the album (without Broken, but with A Friend For The Apocalypse) is available on the streaming sites, under the album title The Secret Storm:
photo by jyoti sackett
photo by jyoti sackett
design by marshall camden
photo by billy hunt
photo by jyoti sackett
art by scott marzano
photo by jyoti sackett
catherine monnes on cello in the ‘family ghost’ video
jeff diehm bts in the 'family ghost' video
tony lechmanski in the 'fast lane' video
photo by jyoti sackett
