C’mon, Aimee. Give Us A Smile | Well, maybe don’t ask her in person.
AIMEE MANN
Thu, Aug 7: mainstage.
Most rock stars are ruled by their ids, but not Aimee Mann, the cool, cerebral, pale blonde singer/songwriter who even named her independent CD label “SuperEgo Records.” She’s spent her last six albums—including her most recent release, 2008’s @#%&*! Smilers—keeping her wilder impulses in check, seldom raising her voice above that familiar mellow croon as she sings about heartbreak, lost love, and urban anomie, her meticulously crafted lyrics full of complex verse structures and internal rhymes. Listening to an Aimee Mann song is like doing the Sunday Times crossword puzzle on NyQuil.
“Some people are great songwriters without having to work on it or stew over it or mull over it,” Mann says. “It would be great to be one of them, but I’m not. I do have to do some work on them. You’d think working within a tight rhyme scheme would help narrow down the possibilities, but it doesn’t—there’s an infinite number of ways to phrase something. If you’re backed into a corner with a certain figure of speech, there’s always another one that seems like it’ll work just as well, except with a different set of nuances. For me, writing is more about choosing a strong figure of speech than fitting words into a pattern; if I’m attached to a certain image, I find that helps the song flow into the next verse, from point A to point B.”
Point A in Mann’s career, unlikely as it seems now, was as an MTV staple, thanks to “Voices Carry,” the 1985 hit she recorded with ’Til Tuesday, one of those New Wave “haircut bands” who dominated the music-video channel in its early days. But Mann had already been asserting herself as a songwriter by the time ’Til Tuesday broke up in 1990; she went on to record two solo albums for major labels (1993’s Whatever and 1995’s I’m With Stupid), neither of which made much of an impact among record-buyers.
Everyone knows what happened next: the combination of the Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia (whose soundtrack prominently featured several new Mann songs), an Oscar nomination for the plaintive ballad “Save Me,” and the release of Mann’s first independent disc, Bachelor No. 2, resulted in a career renaissance—proof that, contrary to the message of Mann’s songs, sometimes things do work out for the better.
“I certainly lost nothing by going indie as opposed to staying on a major label,” Mann says. “But going the indie route isn’t for everyone. And you need a partner—I’m not sitting there poring over budgets and making calls to retailers to make sure the records are getting to the stores. Being independent is not something you can do on your own. The big problem for me is the public perception of downloading and burning CDs as an alternative to paying for music. It’s decimated the entire music industry, but I’d say that indie record labels have been hit harder than the majors.”
And if there’s an artist whose CDs merit purchasing as physical objects instead of electronic downloads, it’s Aimee Mann—starting with 2002’s Lost in Space, which featured a booklet illustrated by Canadian cartoonist Seth, the packaging of Mann’s albums is often as compelling as the music they contain. (In the case of 2005’s The Forgotten Arm, a disappointing concept album about an alcoholic boxer and his girlfriend traveling across the United States, the CD booklet, illustrated by Owen Smith, was arguably the disc’s main attraction—Mann won her only career Grammy Award for the packaging of The Forgotten Arm.)
“Even when I was on major labels, I tried to be involved with the packaging,” she says. “Of course, there you have to fight just to get access to the art director. They don’t want you involved that way. My father is in advertising, so I guess it runs in the family.”
The @#%&*! Smilers booklet is the work of Canadian-based artist Gary Taxali, whose weathered, faded clip-art illustrations, like signs that have spent the last six decades standing in the rain, immediately set the tone for the album’s sad, abandoned-carnival vibe. “It’s a street in a town where winning isn’t sweet/And every win is the beginning of defeat,” goes a typical lyric. I have a friend who refers to Aimee Mann’s songs as “music to feel bad to”—and it’s hard to argue with her. I mean, just look at that album title, right?
“‘Fucking smilers’—that’s a phrase a friend of mine and I started using after coming across it in a newsgroup called alt.bitter,” Mann says. “It was a thread started by someone ranting that if they ran across one more person telling them to smile, they were going to kill somebody. But I cartooned it up for the album. It seems much less harsh that way.
