FEATURE:
A Buyer’s Guide
Part Eighty-Five: Aimee Mann
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IN this outing…
of A Buyer’s Guide, I am recommending the best work of Aimee Mann. She is a Virginia-born artist who released her tenth studio album, Queens of the Summer Hotel, in November. A remarkable and intelligent songwriter, I am keen to explore her work. Prior to that, here is some biography from AllMusic:
“A singer/songwriter of perceptive intelligence who possesses a refined sense of craft, Aimee Mann sustained a long, successful career that ran from the twilight of new wave until the height of adult alternative pop. Mann first came to prominence as the leader of 'Til Tuesday, a stylish pop outfit who had a Top Ten hit with "Voices Carry" in 1985. 'Til Tuesday didn't manage to score a second big hit, but by their last album, Everything's Different Now, in 1988, Mann was collaborating with Jules Shear and Elvis Costello, a sign of how respected she was by her songwriting peers. Mann launched her solo career in 1993 with Whatever, landing an alternative rock hit with "I Should've Known," but it was its 1995 sequel, I'm with Stupid," that was instrumental in building the loyal audience that would stick with her through the decades. Mann consolidated that cult success with her soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 epic Magnolia, work that led to an Academy Award nomination for Best Song for "Save Me." Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo arrived in its wake, the first of many albums she released on her indie label SuperEgo. Mann's consistency -- every few years, she'd release a new set of originals -- overshadowed her artistic hunger, as she complemented her regular albums by appearing in films, collaborating with Ted Leo in the Both, and working in musical theater, including writing music for a musical adaptation of Girl, Interrupted that turned into her 2021 album, Queen of the Summer Hotel.
Mann led 'Til Tuesday from 1983 through 1990. Her first solo album, Whatever, was a more introspective, folk-tinged effort than 'Til Tuesday's records, and received positive reviews upon its release in the summer of 1993. The album was a modest hit, spending seven weeks on the American charts, where it peaked at 127.
Early in 1995, Mann had a minor hit with "That's Just What You Are," a song included on the soundtrack to the television series Melrose Place. Following the success of the single, Mann was set to release her second solo album in the first half of 1995, but her record label, Imago, filed for bankruptcy before its release. She signed a contract with Reprise Records after Imago went under, but Imago prevented her from releasing any records. For most of 1995, Mann battled Imago in an attempt to free herself from the label, eventually winning her independence at the end of the year. After her dispute with Imago was settled, she signed with DGC Records. Mann's second album, I'm with Stupid, was released in England in late 1995 and in January of 1996 in America. Again, it was greeted with positive reviews yet weak sales.
Mann's career got a kick-start in early 2000, however, when she released her soundtrack for the critically acclaimed film Magnolia; the song "Save Me" was later nominated for an Academy Award. Originally available only at live dates, the solo Bachelor No. 2 received a national release in May. In mid-2002, Mann returned to the forefront with the self-released Lost in Space.
Late 2004 saw the release of Live at St. Ann's Warehouse, a CD/DVD package recorded during her summer tour. It was followed in 2006 by the critically acclaimed Forgotten Arm, a concept album built around the return from Vietnam of a drug-addicted boxer. Mann released a collection of Christmas songs called One More Drifter in the Snow in 2006. @#%&! Smilers followed in 2008.
Mann spent the next few years working on adapting The Forgotten Arm into a musical, a project that was ultimately abandoned. She remained in the spotlight through semi-regular concerts and a memorable cameo on the IFC comedy series Portlandia before finally returning in September 2012 with Charmer, her first album in four years. In 2013, Mann started performing with Ted Leo in a project that was eventually named Both; the duo released an album, also called Both, in 2014. Following that, Mann turned her attention to her ninth solo album, recording the deliberately slow and sad Mental Illness with producer Paul Bryan. The record appeared in March 2017.
In 2018, Mann began working on a musical adaptation of Girl, Interrupted, the 1993 memoir from Susanna Kaysen that turned into a 1999 film starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. By 2021, the musical had yet to appear, but Mann recorded her songs for 2021's Queens of the Summer Hotel, which was produced by Paul Bryan”.
If you have not heard of Aimee Mann or are slightly new to her work, this A Buyer’s Guide highlights the four essential studio albums, the underrated gem, and her latest release. There is also an interesting book that makes for useful reference. Here is my guide to the best work…
OF the incredible Aimee Mann.
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The Four Essential Albums
Whatever
Release Date: 11th May, 1993
Labels: Imago Records (original release)/Geffen (reissue)
Producers: Tony Berg/Jon Brion/Michael Hausman/Aimee Mann
Standout Tracks: I Should've Known/4th of July/Stupid Thing
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=88957&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2V6NgriUw7DSFLceZjp0xM?si=SZdwA_luTMuwD8GfitBxDQ
Review:
“On her solo debut Whatever, the former vocalist for Til Tuesday cements her position as a center-stage artist and top-notch songwriter, and Aimee Mann's blend of wit, smarts, cynicism, and downright humability make for a wonderfully pleasing collection of catchy songs. Musically, the jangle-pop feel of Whatever harkens back to the Beatles and the Byrds but without forsaking its contemporary origin. Lyrically, it is often hard to know whether Mann is spilling her guts out over a love or a deal gone bad. In fact, it is often a combination. But the seamless ease with which she tells the tales, moving from her head to her heart and back again, exposes her mighty talent. Teaming with some of her former bandmates, including longtime collaborator Jon Brion, gives Mann a comfort and a sure footing from which to climb and stretch, which she does with certainty. "I Should've Known," "Could've Been Anyone," and "Say Anything" get the heads bobbing, while the more somber "4th of July" and "Stupid Thing" will beckon forth even the loneliest of hankies. And how many artists pay tribute to Charles Dickens? (Witness "Jacob Marley's Chain.") Talk about literate songwriters and you have to speak of Aimee Mann. The dismissive tone of the title belies the time that was put into this album, for even after its recording, it took Mann quite a long while to find a home. Initially released on Imago Records, Whatever was later reissued by Geffen Records” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: Jacob Marley's Chain
I'm with Stupid
Release Date: November 1995
Label: Geffen
Producer: Jon Brion
Standout Tracks: Choice in the Matter/Par for the Course/That’s Just What You Are
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=107203&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/0N3PbNuwko4aAMnJ19W3iM?si=r0YhSnXkRWKyDPxpPoPonQ
Review:
“Most of the folks who’ve worn a T-shirt with the deathlessly popular slogan ”I’m With Stupid” over the years were, presumably, kidding. Aimee Mann, who borrows it for her new album title, isn’t. If you never got past the former ‘Til Tuesday leader’s deceptive porcelain looks and pretty, disaffected murmur to discover the misanthrope within, you may be shocked at just how vitriolically well I’m With Stupid lives up to its promising title. She administers scoldings to ex-boyfriends, ex-record labels, and other alleged nincompoops with a degree of indignation Alanis Morissette probably has yet to imagine in her young life. Yet, for the liberal amount of times Mann resorts to the F-word while raking these rakes over the coals, she remains one of rock’s most elegantly gifted melodic and lyrical writers, with a well-attuned psychological acuity to her catchy kiss-offs that any angry young woman would envy. Bitterness, regret, and recrimination never sounded any sweeter, or smarter.
Mann’s first solo album, 1993’s cult-attracting Whatever, was an odd, frequently brilliant mix of buoyant Beatles-isms and weary post-breakup resignation. I’m With Stupid is a consistently tougher number, employing fewer fab flourishes in favor of a big, cranky, buzzing bottom end that anchors her broadsides closer to the gut whence they hail. And she sounds prouder as well as louder. In tender moments she might own up to her own codependent culpability in these quagmires (”And all that stuff I knew before/Just turned into ‘Please love me more,’ ” she admits in an unusually vulnerable couplet). Mostly, though, Mann is the model of resilience, blaming it on the other guy and — as in ”That’s Just What You Are,” where an ex’s lazy declaration of independence is deftly turned back into an insult — making a damn good case why. Hail the once and future queen of kiss-and-tell-off” – Entertainment Weekly
Choice Cut: Long Shot
Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo
Release Date: 2nd May, 2000
Labels: SuperEgo/V2
Producers: Jon Brion/Mike Denneen/Buddy Judge/Aimee Mann/Brendan O'Brien
Standout Tracks: Nothing Is Good Enough/Red Vines/Driving Sideways
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=107206&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2oAh7vprZx8iSqoyNxQASX?si=HLZuvLSAT9KRoGq849eYbA
Review:
“Mann has said that Bachelor No. 2 could’ve come out as early as 1998, but a combination of label gridlock and the marketing cycle around Magnolia, whose soundtrack hit stores just before the film’s December 1999 theatrical debut, delayed its release until the following May. In the meantime, on tour, an impatient Mann sold homemade EPs of her new music, in what she has characterized as a “real DIY fuck-you-record-company-I’m-selling-it-myself” gesture. And after the no-confidence vote from Iovine, she bought back her masters from Interscope, founded the label SuperEgo, and put out Bachelor No. 2 on her own. That courageous move presaged a future where artists with dedicated fan bases wouldn’t need corporate middlemen to access them.
With a boost in name recognition from Magnolia and the Oscars, sales of the album soared past 200,000—easily outperforming I’m With Stupid. (This was an especially decisive victory for Mann: In 1999, then-Sony VP Gail Marowitz had told the Times that “if Aimee sold 70,000 records independently, she would be making more money than if she sold 300,000 on a major label.”) It was in collaborating with Anderson on a movie that eventually played in more than 1,000 theaters that Mann finally found a wider audience primed to appreciate her pithy, disenchanted songs.
Largo’s is the rare story of a small, independently owned music venue that has a happy ending. Flanagan and friends left the original venue for a larger one, Largo at the Coronet, in 2008. Eleven years later, Brion maintains a monthly Friday-night residency, and in December, Mann and Ted Leo are scheduled to play three nights of Christmas shows. “For a while there,” Mann once said, “I was actually going to call the record Underdog Day.” Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo probably makes a grander, more elegant name for a contemporary classic. But the alternate title certainly would have fit” – Pitchfork
Choice Cut: Calling It Quits
Mental Illness
Release Date: 31st March, 2017
Label: SuperEgo
Producer: Paul Bryan
Standout Tracks: Lies of Summer/Patient Zero/Knock It Off
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=1158451&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1YRaL8DFmYsu52szGJWO9t?si=JXNuPtXmTJWVvZCl_1jgqg
Review:
“Slyly referencing the perceived fragility of the melancholic singer-songwriter with the title of her new solo album – her ninth – Aimee Mann is making a relevant point: falling in love, falling out of love, being with someone, being alone, can drive some people seriously demented.
Mann has been a solo chronicler of such altered states since her 1993 debut, Whatever, yet she takes it up a notch here with her strongest collection of songs since 2000’s Bachelor No. 2. This time around – sensing, perhaps, that her precise, character-driven lyrics required extra sensitivity – Mann replaces pop/rock crunch with the warmest of Laurel Canyon acoustics.
The results are silky earworms of the highest order, with Mann admirably making solitude and sadness entities that should be inhabited instead of spurned” – The Irish Times
Choice Cut: Goose Snow Cone
The Underrated Gem
Charmer
Release Date: 17th September, 2012
Label: SuperEgo
Producer: Paul Bryan
Standout Tracks: Labrador/Soon Enough/Gamma Ray
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=473855&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/0FAifNXe3C8AHqTe25ggcg?si=4mJzqMArTTWHiFiyf8qgoQ
Review:
“On first listen, Charmer plays like Mann’s most superficial outing. It’s certainly her breeziest, least thorniest and easiest to swallow. Yet closer inspection reveals this to be a thematically unified collection of songs exploring superficiality in all its guises. Against a polished backdrop, Mann acerbically dissects vanity, physical beauty, and social status in track after track, as the characters that populate the album use their appearances and reputations to manipulate and barter their ways through life. The charmer of the title track is ruled by self-hatred and hidden agendas, a friend amicable enough to earn the nickname “Gumby” is actually a wayward father and on “Labrador,” a callous lover makes a pet of the narrator.
Mann has chosen to score her words with music that borrows from Harry Nilsson, Fleetwood Mac’s mid-‘70s work, and Joni Mitchell’s hit singles – in short, intelligent yet radio-ready masterstrokes of studio craft that cloaked insightfully cynical messages in primary colored pop bouquets. The trouble here is, while Mann’s words often sting, Charmer is stuck in a sort of sonic purgatory that’s competently, unadventurously spacey and twangy.
For the album to be a total success, its broad strokes would have to be the kinds that burn themselves into listeners’ memories. Unfortunately, Mann lacks the sort of extroverted dynamism to sell material this compact and direct. Problematically, the songs also frequently fail to slowly worm their way into your subconscious in the expected ways. The album lacks the unassuming, artisanal quality that’s always been so integral to the singer’s work, even during her most accessible moments. At Charmer’s lowest points, she almost seems to be tempering her edge and wit to be congruent with the innocuous arrangements, as on the surprisingly dim “A girl who lives in crazytown/Where craziness gets handed down” chorus of the overly slick “Crazytown.”
Charmer is at its finest during the most subdued, quietly detailed stretches, which veer closer to what we’ve heard from Mann on past efforts. While “Slip And Roll” finds her reverting back to the boxing fascination that was so apparent on The Forgotten Arm, the song’s unadorned yet careful composition makes it a highlight, while the bouncy but haunting “Soon Enough” favorably recalls Mann’s collaborations with Jim O’Rourke.
Likewise, the less varnished, James Mercer-assisted “Live A Lie” is a looser detour, a touch earthier than the songs that surround it, though still tuneful and in keeping with Charmer’s core lyrical concerns. “You can see yourself in the side mirror/Tossing your hair/If no one is there/Then why do you care?” wonders the Shins’ frontman as he begins to trade barbs with Mann, none sharper than the latter singer’s piercingly offhand “No one bares a grudge like a boy genius/Just past his prime/Gilding his cage a bar at a time.”
With such winning moments, it’s hard not to wonder what kind of album Charmer could have been had Mann spent more of the record in her comfort zone, admirable as her will to toy with vibrant, synth-dominated arrangements is” – American Songwriter
Choice Cut: Charmer
The Latest Album
Queens of the Summer Hotel
Release Date: 5th November, 2021
Label: SuperEgo
Producer: Scott Bryan
Standout Tracks: Give Me Fifteen/Burn It Out/I See You
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/20865229?ev=rb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7b9VCvOsMz0N4oFD9YUgHo?si=yg_HvbtxTEeaRh_1gd8U0A
Review:
“Despite the heavy subject matter—and arrangements largely hewing to piano, strings, and acoustic guitar, with the occasional horns and drums—Mann often counterposes lighter melodies and rhythms with the downbeat material. It’s a trick she’s often employed (think “Nothing Is Good Enough” off of Bachelor No. 2), and it works again here, as the bleak lyricism of “Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath” employs a gently loping waltz. Even more effective is “Give Me Fifteen,” a song that details the danger inherent in a misogynistic ’60s medical process, with its doctor breezily announcing, “In the time it takes to walk around the block / I can have you scheduled for electroshock.” The musical accompaniment to this darkness? A bouncy rhythm and hooky melodies, not unlike her cover of “One” from the Magnolia soundtrack.
In some ways, the imposition of shorter song lengths necessitated by the musical format juices her songs, lending a Guided By Voices-like sense of get-in-and-get-out brevity, leaving the listener wanting more. “Home By Now” and “Little Chameleon,” with their simple piano intros and drawn-out strings, both come in well under the two-minute mark, but are all the more impactful for it. And “You Could Have Been A Roosevelt,” a Beatles-esque composition, barely crosses that time threshold, yet is stunning—not just one of the best tracks on the record, but able to hold its own against her finest work.
The overall vibe created by the record, though, is mellow, with swaying rhythms and quiet compositions that take advantage of her talent for softer, low-register delivery. Opener “You Fall” sets the tone well, with her backing vocals and brushed drums establishing a vibe apropos for a smoky lounge, maybe even from the era in question. And the one-two punch of mid-album tracks “You Don’t Have The Room” and “Suicide Is Murder” make for a musical and thematic core to the record, the former a mournful rejoinder blended with elegantly swooning strings and the latter an aching ballad of regret, but both containing her not-quite-staccato piano playing opening up into something grander.
The most stage-indebted of the numbers do come with a slight asterisk, however. “At The Frick Museum,” with its sing-song melody and repetition, feels like it’s meant to be heard in an off-Broadway setting, and “12 In Mexico,” with its 3/4 stroll and declamatory statements about “I’m the crazy one they can point to,” doesn’t quite pop on its own. Between those and the “Check” reprise, some instrumentation comes across a little too much like filler.
But even with a few forgettable numbers, Queens Of The Summer Hotel makes an impact. No knowledge of its origin story in a theatrical production is needed to make these narratives of longing and tragedy sing, just as no electric guitar is required to showcase Mann’s ace knack for songwriting. It may fall on the more mellow and restrained side of her catalogue, but this is a record to be savored—mining beauty (and yes, some humor) from pain is an Aimee Mann specialty, and this record serves as further testament to that fact. It’s been nearly four decades since she founded ’Til Tuesday, but the musician has never sounded more confident” – The A.V. Club
Choice Cut: Suicide Is Murder
The Aimee Mann Book
Aimee Mann On Track: Every Album, Every Song (On Track)
Author: Jez Rowden
Publication Date: 1st April, 2021
Publisher: Sonicbond
Synopsis:
“Any consideration of the song writing craft would be incomplete without the inclusion of American singer/songwriter Aimee Mann. From her first steps as singer and bass player with '80s synth pop band 'Til Tuesday, who scored a massive MTV hit with 'Voices Carry' in 1985, she has continually produced starkly autobiographical and often ironically melodic songs that cut through the emotional detail. With a career now spanning almost forty years, she has built a catalogue of nine studio albums since going solo in the early 1990s and, via a series of record label frustrations, has developed into a fiercely independent recording artist, flying outside the mainstream. Her critical acclaim has never wavered, and whilst happy to work in a niche market, her soundtrack for the film Magnolia and the accompanying Oscar nomination raised her profile considerably, adding to her stalwart army of fans. This book gives an overview of Aimee Mann's career from her earliest days, making it big with 'Til Tuesday and onward through her solo career to date, investigating every recorded track in a comprehensive guide for fans and new listeners keen to investigate a true original and double Grammy winner whose songs should be much more widely recognised” – Amazon.co.uk