My Secret Career 41: Onion Hits The Big Time

My childhood nickname was Onion. Which is ironic because I absolutely hate onions. But I never minded the nickname. Teammates called for passes in soccer games by shouting, “Onion, I’m open!” Like, it wasn’t one of these nicknames that only pops up occasionally. It was my NAME.

So I thought it fitting that I would release an album under the name “Onion”. 

I lived in New York City by that time and my real career was chugging along. I was doing regular plays, experimental theater, commercials, TV shows, student films, indie films, you name it I did it.

But I was also nursing My Secret Career in private.

The result? The claustrophobic and disturbing Beauty Is Ordinary.

If you’re counting, this is album number four. Shit’s about to change.

My Secret Career 41: The Rhode Island Trilogy

I am winding this project up by highlighting each “album” along the way.

By the time I left Rhode Island for New York City in the fall of 1994, I had recorded three albums worth of original material.

1985-1987 brought Fecund Youth’s modestly titled Hung Like A Bull.

1993 saw The Mahoneys’ deliver the rough and tumble Live From The 20th Century.

Following that was 1994’s Cocksure? by Rhode Island Red.

These sound primitive because they were. But they will tell you what my life was like throughout that whole period.

Peruse at your leisure!

My Secret Career 28: brenwillsull “I, Phone”

This one accidentally became an album.

I don’t even remember when I got my first smart phone. I suppose I could ask the algorithm and it could find a dated image of me from some surveillance footage at a Mac store and find out, but I prefer the haze of my awful memory to pixelated truth.

Whatever day that was, it started a looooong recording process. I would noodle around on my guitar, if a melody clicked I would spew forth improvised words until something concrete locked into place, and then I would record a voice memo of the song as a placeholder.

The idea was always that I would return to these sketches and flesh them out. Finish them. Produce them.

But years went by. The songs started to pile up. I showed no signs of moving towards any official recording.

Finally in 2018 I had had enough. I did an extensive search of my phone and chose the best of the bunch. For every one of the eleven tracks in this album, there are ten that failed to pass muster. A siren interrupts, a note goes awry, someone knocks on the door, someone yells shut up, something ruined many of those voice memos.

But these eleven? These eleven songs are only possible because of two things. I and phone.

So please give a listen to brenwillsull’s 2018 album called I, Phone. Oh, and the “band” name? Since this is in a way the most basic version of me and my music (an acoustic guitar and a voice), I thought I would almost be myself.

First name, Brendan. Two middle names, William and Sullivan, after my father’s first and mother’s maiden name. 

It took a computer in my pocket for a decade for me to make it.