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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Aimee Mann talks about addiction, depression, compulsion, her new album "Lost in Space" -- and freedom from major-label tyranny.
Sep 10, 2002 | People who pick up Aimee Mann's new album "Lost in Space" expecting lighthearted references to June Lockhart and Will Robinson may be flabbergasted by the 11-song cycle exploring drugs and addiction. Even those familiar with Mann's always cynical, metaphorically rich lyrics will be surprised to hear her voice pleading "Let me be your heroin" on "High on Sunday 51" or, on "This Is How It Goes," bluntly cutting to the chase in the chorus: "It's all about drugs, it's all about shame."
Even the opening track and lead single offers this frightening existential dilemma: "Say you were split, you were split into fragments, and none of the pieces would talk to you ..." While buoyed by an instrumental inventiveness that surpasses her work with Jon Brion, the material may still have people wondering if success has brought on some kind of Mariah breakdown.
Not likely. Mann is just capitalizing on her own long-standing fascination with psychology and the innate dysfunction of the human condition. Mann is the kind of person whose friends give her enormous encyclopedias of depression as gifts (though while touring, she's more likely to tear through "lighter" fare, like a stack of Paul Theroux paperbacks).
"I pull from a few different places," she says in a telephone interview, trying to articulate the mysterious space from which song lyrics come. "There's always an element that is just from my own head. It's often a combination of things that I'm reading about, and I always have an interest in anything that has to do with psychology. In the past few years I've been doing a lot of reading about addiction and alcoholism and that type of thing. Narcissistic personality disorder is another good one. The problem is that if I talk about where it comes from it sounds so dry and clinical.
"It's more a drive to really understand people. People are pretty fucked up, and I'm right along there with them. If my songs give people the impression that I'm emotionally disturbed, well -- yeah, you're right! At the same time, what makes a great song is not necessarily a page straight from your diary. Whatever you write about, whatever brought you to write about that topic, you also always have to apply that to yourself. So it might as well be about me, even if it's not."
A part of Mann is wary of dissecting her work, preferring instead for people to take it for whatever they feel. Speaking of songwriters she admires, she explains, "If a song means a lot to me, I want it to mean a lot to the person who wrote it. I don't really want the person to take a step back and say, 'Oh, it has nothing to do with me, it was just an exercise. I read something in a book and thought, How intriguing.' As an audience member, I feel a little let down when people back away from their own music. If I ever read an interview with Elliott Smith and he said, 'Oh, it's all totally fiction, I'm completely well-adjusted,' I'd feel let down. I want to feel that he's courageous enough to share things that are difficult and painful."
Given the success of Mann's contributions to the "Magnolia" soundtrack, and the fat sales of her self-distributed "Bachelor #2" (which far exceeded any of her major-label releases), what would the labels think of "Lost in Space"?
"I think they would have a problem with a record that, first of all, has a consistent theme to it, and that the theme is, you know, obsession, compulsion, depression and addiction. Working with a big corporation, you always feel like someone is looking over your shoulder," she says, and it sounds like it could be a lyric to one of her songs. In fact, her first album with her old band 'Til Tuesday did feature a song called "Looking Over My Shoulder."
Mann continues, "That always makes any artistic project the poorer. The labels are always second-guessing what people will buy and I was trying to second-guess what the label was guessing people would buy. This time, the only criterion was whether I thought it was good or not. I didn't worry about singles, because we don't have singles. We can't get that happening.
"'Lost in Space' is a real old-fashioned long-player," Mann says with a laugh. "It's a Long-Playing Record Album! It's not just because I grew up with that -- records that were good from beginning to end, records that people cared about, rather than just a loose collection of songs or even worse, a bunch of crap with one or two singles. I think it's a rip-off to the public, who pay a lot of money for a CD and should get something more for it. There were some songs that didn't make it on the record, because I didn't think they were good enough, that probably would have been more appealing to a label if I were still dealing with one. As it is, it has a really consistent flavor from song to song, and it is nice not to have to compromise that."
The new album marks the first time Mann has worked with the same label for two consecutive discs, and the label -- SuperEgo -- is, not coincidentally, her own. Whether she'd be in this position if fate and bad timing hadn't pushed her there is another question altogether. After 'Til Tuesday disbanded in the late 1980s, Mann found herself contractually bound to their old label, Epic.
After several years of legal maneuvering, Mann released "Whatever" on Imago, which promptly lost its distribution deal with BMG. Though Imago existed only on paper, Mann had several more years of legal struggles before her second solo project, "I'm With Stupid," was released on Geffen, which was ultimately absorbed by Universal. And so on.
