Another trip to Starbucks earned me another of these iTunes Pick of the Week card… with Mary Lambert’s ‘Secrets’, someone I would probably not have checked out otherwise… I watched the video for the song, which is a straightforward tune about self acceptance in the vein of Meghan Trainor’s ‘All About That Base’ – I mean, this is obviously the first thing that crossed my mind!
Mary is a pretty plump red hair, who sings about her ‘secrets’: she is overweigh, gay out of the closet and may be a bit crazy with a dysfunctional family, but you can’t have a more positive attitude that this girl has! She ‘loves her butt and won’t shut up’, ‘can’t think straight, she’s so gay’, but ‘doesn’t care if the world knows what her secrets are’…. About that, music industry!
If the smart and bold lyrics jumped at your face, the song is definitively a very catchy pop tune, with a euphoric chorus and children dancing and jumping in the background, and it turns around this affirmation:
‘They tell us from the time we’re young/To hide the things that we don’t like about ourselves/Inside ourselves/I know I’m not the only one/Who spent so long attempting to be someone else/Well I’m over it’… and I applause anyone with such an attitude!
Not only the woman has the right temper and tempo but all this has to come straight from her real life… but when you read a bit about her life – and as you can guess, she is very open about it – you won’t believe it, as it is worst than a Dickens’s novel: she was raised in a strict Pentecostal and poor household, was molested repeatedly by her father as a child, was gang raped at 17, she is an ex alcohol and drug addict, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and attempted suicide at 19! Jeez, not only she survived but how well did she survive! This big smile is certainly even more amazing.
Mary Lambert was also the female voice on Macklemore’s ‘Same Love’, she has released an EP, ‘Welcome to the Age of my Body’ last December, and has just dropped her debut full-length ‘Heart on My Sleeve’ on October 14th. Listen to ‘Secrets’, and download the song on iTunes using the code EAYE9EW9WTFA,… it’s so uplifting: