At John Coombs' wedding in 2017, Angel Olsen performed her song “Some Things Cosmic.” It was the first song by the singer-songwriter Coombs had heard a few years earlier, and it “was a real game-changer for me, personally,” he recalls. It was also a game-changer for Olsen: After Coombs heard the song, the A&R executive signed her to Secretly Group's sub-label Jag Jagwar.
As vice president of A&R at Secretly Group (which includes JagJagwar, Dead Oceans, Secretly Canadian, Sadest Factory Records and Secretly Publishing), Coombs has shaped the face of independent music today, from signing Olsen as his first label to many other artists including Mitski, Faye Webster and Mustafa.
It all may have seemed impossible to Coombs, now 38, who as a kid growing up in southern Indiana would pore over the thank-you notes in the liner notes of the CDs he bought with his allowance. “At first it was like, 'Okay, sure, Mom and Dad,' but then it was like, 'Everybody from the label,'” he says. “Then the dots started to connect: There are labels. I started to become fascinated with label culture.”
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He discovered Bloomington, Indiana-based Secretly Canadian while backing The Impossible Shapes' 2003 album We Like It Wild, and ended up interning for Secretly Distribution while attending Indiana University. Then a series of important events occurred: Shortly before Coombs graduated, Bon Iver released his magnum opus For Emma, Forever Ago on Jagjaguar (who were already affiliated with Secretly Canadian, but the name Secretly Group was added later), key members of Secretly Group's small staff quit, and Coombs found a job there, where he still is today.
At the time, Coombs was “wearing a lot of hats,” something he still says is a perk of working for an indie label when you're starting out in the industry. But after moving to New York in 2010 and opening the label's offices in the city, he leaned more into project management, A&R, and sync licensing. In the mid-2010s, Coombs was also heavily involved in launching Secretly's publishing division. But regardless of his role, or which of the label's diverse group of artists he works with, Coombs says his guiding principle is to “champion the under-the-radar.”
Now, Secretly's artists are some of the most visible in the indie world: Phoebe Bridgers recently opened for Taylor Swift on The Eras Tour, genre-blending trio Khruangbin is playing to massive audiences around the world, and Mitski and Webster are trending on TikTok in 2023. (Mitski's “My Love Mine All Mine” topped TikTok's Billboard Top 50 chart for a record six weeks last fall.) “It just goes to show that there's room for more voices, more adventurous music, in the mainstream,” Coombs says, reflecting on the label group's crossover success. “Audiences are excited about adventurous songwriters. That's what we're good at.”
—Eric Renner Brown