“Secrets and lies. We’re all in pain. Why can’t we share our pain? I’ve spent my entire life trying to make people happy. And the three people I love most in the world hate each others’ guts, I’m stuck in the middle and I can’t take it anymore!”

So comes a powerful emotional outburst by husband, brother and uncle Maurice, played by Timothy Spall in Mike Leigh’s life-affirming family drama, Secrets and Lies (1996). It is a moment of tear-jerking catharsis when years of hidden feelings and secret problems boil to the surface. Secrecy, however, is somehow inevitable in human behaviour, but this week, the first key question is – if you have a secret, why write and perform and song about it? Isn’t that a paradox? Yes, and that’s the whole point. Because song, like any creative endeavour, is a form of release from an internal process, and songwriters are compelled, by nature, to expunge their hidden feelings.

Music’s history, turned to high volumes of tension, is peppered with difficult relationships, not only with sexual partners, but also between performers, and it is those jealousies, frustrations, fears, deceptions, desires and secret activities which can end up expressed in the oblique, passionate, loud or subtle form. How many secrets and lies, or indeed truths, then, for example, have come out in song form about the tensions and behaviour between Jagger and Richards, Lennon and McCartney, Morrissey and Marr, and so many more? Did Paul Simon write and sing with Art Garfunkel on a song relating to their split, before the latter even knew what it meant? How many secrets are revealed in work that makes up the pop soap opera of Fältskog, Ulvaeus, Lyngstad and Andersson? Or through the work of the elusive Bowie, Dylan or Bush? Or the combustible chemistry and chaotic affairs of McKie, Nicks, Buckingham and Fleetwood?

Then there are even bigger secrets. “Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of the state,” said the ruthless Cardinal Richelieu. But when secrecy rules, something is always rotten. And something reeks in Shakespeare’s fictional Denmark, where Hamlet is driven mad by a secret – the murder of his father by his uncle who then married his mother. He is torn whether to reveal it by words, or the action of revenge - to be or not to be, to do or not do, to act or not act. Secrecy is the pivot of his psychology, the doortrap of his tragedy. In the modern world, there is now another dilemma – to spy or not to spy.

Barack Obama, at the beginning of his first term as US president was determined to be a torch of open government. He wanted to cast off the shady era of the Bush administrations where the truth was often cloaked in the alleged vested interests of Cheney and Halliburton. “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” he said, and talked of “accountability through transparency”. He issued a memo on the Freedom of Information Act to federal departments, the data.gov website was set up in 2009 and Obama was something of a pioneer in the promotion open data, the seedbed of so good stuff such as open-source inventions, analysis of information to improve society’s health, the environment, transport and energy.

But, paradoxically, Obama also found himself presiding over intelligence services that not only spied on allies, but also millions of innocent people online, as revealed in the Edward Snowden surveillance revelations. Now the burning issue is whether, as David Cameron hopes, online encryption may be banned to help counter-terrorist intelligence, but without it the internet could not properly function. What a tangled web the world of online secrecy weaves.

So how can we keep a secret? And if so, how then can we stop secrets from doing harm, and only good, or eating us up? Some perfomers begin to believe their own secrets of success, and it is reflected in their later material. Many such dilemmas are expressed in songs, so perhaps George Orwell was right in all sorts of ways, when he wrote, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

So then, let’s open up a world of secrets and secrecy in song nominations. They might contain the sexy or seedy, as in the TV drama, Secret Diary of a Call Girl. But secrets can also be positive and practical, such as trade secrets, or entertaining and skilful, such as those of the Magic Circle. Good secrecy can cover nice surprises, or help keep relationships alive, with a little spark of mystery. Then there are historical secrets, those carried to the grave, or, ones that may be unlocked, such as in the BBC’s Secrets of Bones. Or, on another track, the so-called “secret squirrel” team of boffins and technicians of the British cycling team and the humorous rumour about their “magic wheels”. Secrecy and competitiveness ride together in sport, industry and many other places. The squirrel team’s inventiveness echoes, though in a less serious context, the workings of Alan Turing and his war-time team of whirring wheels and information, who also strove, with success, to be a split second ahead of rivals.

You ain’t seen me, right? If there’s one thing about secrets, they will always out. This week’s secret sorcerer and captain of the covert is returning RR regular attwilightlarks. So reveal your secret songs in nominations in comments below, and optionally in the Spotify playlist by last orders (11pm UK time) on Monday 26 January for the big reveal of results on Thursday 29 January. Eureka! Voila!

To increase the likelihood of your nomination being considered, please:

• Tell us why it’s a worthy contender.
• Quote lyrics if helpful, but for copyright reasons no more than a third of a song’s words.
• Provide a link to the song. We prefer Muzu or YouTube, but Spotify, SoundCloud or Grooveshark are fine.
• Listen to others people’s suggestions and add yours to a collaborative Spotify playlist.
• If you have a good theme for Readers recommend, or if you’d like to volunteer to compile a playlist, please email peter.kimpton@theguardian.com
• There’s a wealth of data on RR, including the songs that are “zedded”, at theMarconium. It also tells you the meaning of “zedded”, “donds” and otherstrange words used by RR regulars.
• Many RR regulars also congregate at the ‘Spill blog.

Please note. Next week - 29 January 2014 - there will be a special edition of Readers Recommend. More details soon …