The Jane Brooks Project

The Jane Brooks Project, or abbreviated as JBP, is one of Emilie Autumn's side projects from the early 2000s. A few songs have been released from this project through live recordings and journal entries (blog posts), but the much-wanted project has most likely been dropped and will not be published, despite claims in 2006 that the album was completed and simply needed to be mixed and mastered.

Story

The Traitor Records website, now unavailable, listed this as the Jane Brooks Project's Biography.

Up until the most recent decades, female songwriters were much like females of any other profession; either nonexistent or relegated to the ranks of eternal subordination. One such female was a woman by the name of Jane Brooks, born in Somerset, England in 1922 and raised in a war-ridden America. The young Ms.Brooks was a songsmith of unparalleled eloquence, wit, and style, though it is questionable whether her songs were ever performed outside of the parlors and intimate lounges of the 1940s and early 50s. In any case, they were certainly never recorded.

But all of that changed when, in early 2000, a group of young American musicians went on an excursion to a local antique shop. They stumbled upon a dog-eared volume containing hundreds of pages of decomposing sheet music, accompanied by several black and white photographs of a striking young woman. Intrigued, research commenced, the woman's identity revealed, her authorship of the songs confirmed, and the sheet music restored to legible condition. The Jane Brooks Project was born.

It is felt that the songs of Jane Brooks could have ranked among the standards of the day had they only enjoyed the same attention given to Jane's male contemporaries. The Jane Brooks project has made it their mission to give Ms.Brooks her rightful place in history. To this end, they are currently in the studio recording the first of several Jane Brooks albums, appropriately entitled, "The Jane Brooks Songbook, Volume I." The album will be released in late 2001.

Jane Brooks

The following is a quote from Autumn summarizing the real-life Jane Brooks, whom her work was based on.

Why am I doing this? Well, it's such a long story, but it involves this very real woman, Jane Brooks, who was alive in the 16th century and who was murdered as a witch for nothing more than giving a boy an apple from her garden. She was no more and no less witch than all women are, and I adopted her years ago with the intention to let her live a full life through these different scenarios. One day she's a 1940s songwriter representing oppressed women, another she's a poet contemplating prostitution, it goes on forever.

The following is a documentation of the real Jane Brooks, a convicted witch, who was hanged during the 17th century. Autumn's claim of the 16th century was probably no more than a misquote or error on her part.

Witches who wished to bewitch or poison others were often said to use apples, as in the folktale of Snow White, who was put to sleep by the poisoned apple of the black witch-queen. In 1657 Richard Jones, a 12-year-old boy in Shepton Mallet in the county of Somerset in England, was said to be bewitched by a girl who gave him an apple. Jones suffered fits, and the neighbors said they saw him fly over his garden wall. The girl, Jane Brooks, was charged with witchcraft, convicted and hanged on March 26, 1658.

Other accounts say people witnessed a murderous double (phantom) of Brooks accosting towns people, for which she was tried and hung. It is possible that there were two separate Jane Brooks' and this is the account for the second.

Album

The Jane Brooks Songbook, Volume I, was never released in its entirety. While cleaning out her musical closet in 2007, Autumn released some of the songs she had from the Project on her compilation album, A Bit O' This & That. Another song, "Faces Like Mine," has been floating around YouTube from what seems to be a live audio recording. Finally, "Gentlemen Aren't Nice" was released in 2008 on Autumn's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun & Bohemian Rhapsody Double Feature EP. 

The known songs from the Project's tracklisting are as follows:

• Gentlemen Aren't Nice
• Be Silent, Be Still
• Don't Blame Me
• Faces Like Mine
• You Fool (Traitor Records Preview clip)
• Lovely (Traitor Records Preview clip)

Rumours

As of the VIP meet and greets from 2012's Fight Like A Girl concert, Emilie was asked about the Jane Brooks Project. She claimed that the album hasn't been dropped, but there has been no sign of any progress or work on the album with her constant touring and the preparation for her musical.