I’ve had Joni Mitchell’s Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm for years without noticing the connection hiding in its credits. The album was partly recorded at Peter Gabriel’s home studio in Somerset — a converted cow barn where the cows would come back and lick the windows.
In early 1986, Mitchell and her husband Larry Klein visited Gabriel’s Ashcombe House. Gabriel had mostly finished So by that point and offered them the use of his studio. The result was “My Secret Place,” a duet between Mitchell and Gabriel that became the album’s lead single. The track was recorded in the same barn where “Sledgehammer” and “In Your Eyes” had been made weeks earlier.
The video for “My Secret Place” was directed by Anton Corbijn.
That name matters if you look at the rest of my collection. Corbijn directed his first Depeche Mode video — “A Question of Time” — in 1986, the same year Mitchell and Klein showed up at Ashcombe House. By 1988, when the “My Secret Place” video was shot in black and white across a desert landscape, Corbijn had already become Depeche Mode’s primary visual collaborator. He would go on to create the artwork for Violator in 1990 and Songs of Faith and Devotion in 1993 — albums I own, with covers I’ve stared at hundreds of times without thinking about the Joni Mitchell connection.
So here’s what I find strange: a cow barn in Somerset brought together Joni Mitchell, Peter Gabriel, and Anton Corbijn in 1986. Gabriel’s So came out of that barn. Mitchell’s “My Secret Place” came out of that barn. And the man who directed the video for that song was simultaneously building the visual identity of Depeche Mode — a band whose records sit on the same shelves as the Joni Mitchell album.
Two parts of my collection I never thought of as connected, linked by a barn where cows used to lick the windows.