Early this year, indie music darling Jonatha Brooke released her fifth solo album, Back in the Circus, on her own Bad Dog Records label. It is one of her most intimate and adventurous albums to date. The singer-songwriter, who will appear at the inaugural San Diego Indie Music Fest on Nov. 14, recently took some time to speak to the Gay & Lesbian Times about life and her latest album.

Jonatha Brooke: It turns out we were mutual fans. We had done a gig together years and years ago, a sort of “songwriter in the round” thing. We struck up a friendship and ran into each other a couple of times and then really made a plan to get together and work on something. So I drove down to Philly and he had this amazing studio behind his main house and we hung out for two days, drank a lot of wine, co-wrote a song and produced another one that I had already finished – and it was like a meeting of the minds. It was a great molecular collaboration. We were really finishing each other’s sentences, musically, and that’s the first time that’s happened to me. So last summer I went on tour with Eric and the Hooters in Germany for five weeks, and that was a blast!

JB: It happened by chance – organically – as I was working on the songs. The one that is probably most specific to that is “Sleeping with the Light On.” I had had that song in my arsenal for a couple years and I didn’t know what to do with it. It was just this song, very plaintive, with an acoustic guitar. And I said, well, I really like this song, and especially after 9/11, it seemed more pressing and more poignant. So how do I re-approach it? I decided to come at it with this haunting Wurlitzer line, and then on a whim, because I’m not that technically oriented, I decided to try and play this drum part myself – I’m not a drummer – and then asked my engineer, Ryan, what happens if we speed this up eight times faster than I played it? And it turned into what you hear on the record.

And the other one, “Less Than Love is Nothing,” it’s that same kind of hyperkinetic, almost David Gray-like beat. I had the whole chorus of that song, and Eric and I worked on the verses together and then we were thinking, why don’t we do something that I would never do? Let’s find a weird, trippy beat that Jonatha Brooke would never do, and let’s put it over that. Let’s put this very languorous, longing chorus that doesn’t sound hyper over a really hyper beat. And we loved it – we loved the juxtaposition.

JB: Like with every record, things unfold and surprise you as they come up and you just kind of roll with it. As I’m writing and producing, I don’t make conscious decisions, I just sort of wait and what comes, comes.

I started doing “Eye in the Sky” in Europe when I was touring with Eric, thinking OK, I want to do a cover song because these 5,000 people in these tiny towns in Germany don’t know who the hell I am. I fell in love with the song because I did it so differently from the original. And when you get at the lyrics, it’s a really gorgeous, haunting song.

“God Only Knows” was my husband’s idea. I had never really listened to it as a musical venture, so I decided to demo it and just see what I got, not thinking that it would go on the album. And it came out so beautifully and it fit with the vibe of everything else.

And “Fire and Rain” was my guitar player’s idea. We demoed that in his garage two summers ago, not thinking with any specifics of putting it on a record, maybe put it on iTunes to get it out there. But it fit with the intimacy of the rest of the record. The beats, the sparseness of it and the haunting quality made it really work with the rest of the material.

It was weird that we ended up with three covers on the album, but it was exciting. And a great challenge as a singer to try and come at other people’s music from my own perspective. I really enjoyed it and I didn’t think I would.

JB: Thank you! My first caveat … was I don’t want it to sound anything like the original. I don’t want acoustic guitar on it, and I don’t want that signature James Taylor lick. I wanted to completely steer clear of anything acoustic guitar-ish or obvious. And I wanted to reharmonize it so that it was really simple and very much my own take on it. Otherwise why bother?

JB: I realized when I started writing for this album – I have this romantic obsession with the circus. I had written about this circus character on a song called “Damn Everything But the Circus,” inspired by this part that I danced as a modern dancer. It was a visceral, angry, carny-girl part, and it inspired this great, imaginative song. I thought, why don’t I, 12 years later, revisit this character and see what she might be up to, just as an exercise. And that became the first song I wrote for the record. That demo is pretty much what made it to the record. I fell in love with that sound and that vibe, that intimacy and that song. That mood became the template for what followed.

So with that as my anchor, the circus became the theme, and it became very fitting, because I had just moved to New York from Malibu, and New York is a wicked circus. I had just gotten remarried, and marriage is a beautiful fabulous circus, and it’s a high-wire act of its own.

And I went to trapeze school. I kept driving by it on the west side highway in Manhattan and seeing these people flying outside on this trapeze and I thought, I gotta try this. So I went to trapeze school and I thought, what a perfect metaphor for everything. And then I consciously set out to write a trapeze metaphor song as a bookend of the album, “No Net Below.” Because it’s such a great metaphor. As kitschy as it can be, the trapeze is such a beautiful concept.

JB: It’s such a cliché, but less really is more. If you can hone in on that kernel of truth –whatever it is you’re trying to say or get at emotionally or musically – the more powerful it is. So you don’t have to throw in every single trick of the book in every measure of your musical phrase; you can parcel it out and sometimes the simplest notes and the simplest lyric is the most devastatingly beautiful.

GLT: Your name was attached to a letter endorsing Sen. John Kerry for president. How disappointed are you by the results of the elections?

JB: I am devastated. It’s shocking, and it feels like an existential crisis of the country and it makes me want to get out. I’m just so sad about it, and so sad that the whole heartland, the working class, the disenfranchised – it seems like a large percentage of those people are the people voting for Bush and basically against their own best interest.

They were talking about it on the radio this morning, the fact that people were voting about morality. Morality was the biggest issue. And here’s a guy who sent the country to war for nothing – and is that not a bad moral choice? And so what are they talking about? OK, morality, read: gay marriage? Is that really such a threat to the institution of heterosexual marriage? What bullshit. My gay friends who are couples and have made some kind of union pact are every bit if not way better couples than my heterosexual couple friends. To sort of spout that as some kind of threat to the institution of marriage is just bull. It makes me want to scream. And the 11 states where [gay marriage] was on the ballot – they slaughtered it. It’s just like – my God, we have to get out; the country is going to the dogs.

GLT: On the other hand, the country needs people like you to stay and fight the good fight, to help build the America we envision.

JB: That’s right, but what can you do if there’s a willful half of the country that’s as incurious and blindly faith-driven as the president? Perhaps that’s what they think of the liberal Massachusetts type – liberal being the dirty word. So how do you bridge that? I don’t know. I think it’ll be interesting to see if Bush makes any attempt at conciliatory moves or dialogue or addressing the issues that are so glaringly disasters.