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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Aimee Mann explains her eagerly awaited new concept album, her distrust of major labels and why she's spoiling for a good fight.
Apr 4, 2005 | After dissolving her '80s band, 'Til Tuesday, and pursuing a solo career, Aimee Mann drew as much attention for her consistently troubled, often outright antagonistic relationship with labels in the mid-1990s as for her music. Then director P.T. Anderson released "Magnolia" in 1999, a film he said was inspired by Mann's songs, and which also featured some of her best work. It managed to focus attention back on her music and expose her to a wider audience than ever before.
After that career boost, Mann steadfastly continued an independent career, releasing her last two records ("Bachelor No. 2" in 2000 and "Lost in Space" in 2002) and her upcoming, much-anticipated concept album, "The Forgotten Arm" (available May 3), on her own Superego label. "The Forgotten Arm," she says, is set in the early '70s, and recounts the shaky relationship between John, a Vietnam vet and boxer, and Caroline as they meet, fall in love and set out on a cross-country road trip (go here to listen to a few sample tracks). Produced by Joe Henry and recorded over just nine days, it's her most straight-ahead rock record to date, but the songwriting is as crafted and subtle as ever, a series of first-person accounts that delve into the psychological subtleties of the two characters with Mann's customary grace.
That won't surprise her fans; Mann is one of the best songwriters of her generation, unfailingly articulate and rarely abstract, but never overly wordy or self-consciously clever -- which is quite a feat. She writes lovingly sculpted melodies that duck and weave and pirouette and double back on themselves with serpentine grace. She then pairs them with lyrics that offer richly detailed psychological portraits of broken lives. She clearly has a fascination with chronicling the lives of people who are falling apart, and her music often treads a delicate emotional line: Melancholy bordering on desperation, but simultaneously conveying a kind, motherly compassion and sense of comfort. She manages to be victim and savior at the same time, and the trick, I think, is in her voice, warm with intimacy but always somewhat detached from the stories she tells, touched with a chill of cynicism, unimpressed with her own emotional vulnerability. It sounds like a paradox, and it is, but that's what makes her music so unusual and so moving. In her Grammy-nominated song "Save Me" (a rare instance of the Grammys singling out an artist's best work), Mann is calling out for help, but she also sounds so wise and in control that you can't imagine a better person to help her than herself.
I met with Mann on a Sunday afternoon, a day after she'd performed much of the new record to an appreciative crowd at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. She was hungry, and rejected in no uncertain terms the TGI Friday's in her hotel, so we talked over barbecued brisket at local Austin restaurant Threadgill's.
Did you start "The Forgotten Arm" with a story, or with the desire to make a concept album?
As I started writing I just liked more and more the idea of having a story, and I think writing songs for movies put this idea in my head -- it was almost like writing songs for a nonexistent movie. I had some scenes from movies like "Two-Lane Blacktop," or a scene from P.T. Anderson's first movie, "Hard Eight," when Gwyneth Paltrow and John C. Reilly run off together, in my head. Because I'd written this song "King of the Jailhouse," which is about these two people running off together, and that's just such a classic thing, to feel like you can leave all of your problems behind.
