At What Comes After The Blues, Secretly Group Celebrates Its Three-Decade Journey To The Forefront Of Indie Music

“It’s been a bit like a family reunion,” Ben Swanson said onstage at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on Saturday night. “The good kind, not the kind where your weird uncle says mildly inappropriate things all night.” He was addressing a crowd of 600 or so, made up of longtime Secretly Group employees, former associates, artists, and locals from the community in Bloomington, Indiana. Everyone was gathered for What Comes After The Blues: Secretly 30, a three-day event celebrating three decades of Secretly, the label group encompassing Dead Oceans, Jagjaguwar, Secretly Canadian, and a host of other independent music institutions. His sentiment — the family reunion bit, weird uncle joke aside — was something I heard echoed time and time again through the weekend. Ben, along with his brother Chris, founded Secretly Canadian back in 1996, while they were still students at Bloomington’s Indiana University. A few years later, they joined forces with Darius Van Arman, who had launched Jagjaguwar. Then, in 2007, Phil Waldorf entered with Dead Oceans. Now, the four founders/owners watch over a label group that has grown from scrappy small-town origins to being one of the most lauded and influenti...