What Aimee Mann's Music Means to Me

Looking back over the long arc of her career (and its intersection with my life)

Aimee Mann performs at 'Music & Conversation with Aimee Mann and Ann Powers' at Damrosch Park on July 30, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

Last week, my wife and I went to a (very good) Jason Isbell concert in Philadelphia. Long-time readers know I’m a fan of his. But this show was special because his opening act was Aimee Mann, who’s been making music for a lot longer than Isbell—music I’ve been listening to for nearly 40 years. That made the show a full-fledged double-header for me, and one that stirred up a lot of feelings—about aging, about the place of music in my life, and in particular about the place of Mann’s music in my life.

Origin Stories

Growing up in the southern Connecticut suburbs of New York City in a broken home—my mother disappeared after she suffered a mental breakdown in 1978, when I was eight years old, leaving my younger brother and I to be raised solely by our father—I was often miserable. By the early ’80s, I was spending hours a day watching music videos on the recently launched MTV. I’d been obsessed with rock music since I was introduced by my parents at a very young age to Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and other artists of the 1970s. After my parents’ divorce, withdrawing into an imaginative world of songs and concept albums and rock personas was a kind of balm for my lost and wounded soon-to-be-adolescent soul.

I never much liked the synth-pop that enjoyed heavy rotation on MTV in its early days. Still, the video for “Voices Carry” by the band Til Tuesday caught my ear and eye. The verse was weirdly creepy and unsatisfying. All tension, no release—the kind of verse that makes you think, if this song doesn’t have a great payoff in the chorus, I never want to hear it again. But then the chorus hit. This wasn’t a Thompson Twins knock-off. This was The Beatles refashioned for post-New Wave tastes.

As for the video itself, it was awkward and pretentious, like much of what appeared on the channel in that era. But the lead singer of the band was striking—a waif-like woman with spiked punky-blonde hair and enormous eyes who acts out the lyrics in a powerful and memorable way. The protagonist is involved with a man who abuses her and insists she never express her emotions, especially in public: “Hush hush / Keep it down now / Voices carry,” the chorus repeats over and over. By the end of the song and video, the woman breaks free of the demand for silence while facing a barrage of verbal abuse for her insolent defiance.

It was striking. But also, to my 15-year-old self, forgettable. I didn’t buy the single or the album it came from. For all I knew, the band with its noteworthy lead singer would be a one-hit wonder, never to be heard from again.

But that proved to be wrong. The following year, Til Tuesday was back with a follow-up, and its lead single grabbed me the moment its chorus began. “Coming Up Close” has one of the loveliest chorus melodies I had ever heard up to that point in my life. To this day, it gives me chills. It was around this point that I learned the lead singer and songwriter of the band was named Aimee Mann. I was definitely intrigued. But I also continued to dislike the group’s typically mid-80s synthetic sound. (I preferred REM and The Smiths.) So once again, I didn’t purchase the single or the album—or the third and final record Til Tuesday released two years later, by which time I was in college, distracted by a million people, experiences, books, and bands. If Mann hadn’t launched a solo career a few years later, I may never have thought about her again.

Launchings

In the 31 years since Mann set out on her own with the enduringly great album Whatever, I’ve been pretty busy.

In 1993, I was a 23-year-old graduate student finishing up an MA in history at New York University and transitioning to Michigan State, where I was beginning a Ph.D. in political science. I had been dating on and off for the previous 2-1/2 years the woman who would become my wife two years later. Mann’s solo debut was one of a handful of soundtracks to that moment of my life.

All the promise I’d heard on those early Til Tuesday songs finally reached full flower on the record. The melodies and lyrics were now far more accomplished and mature. The thin and sterile synth-saturated sound was gone, replaced with a movable feast of alternative-rock arrangements, each song living in its own aural universe perfectly crafted to suit its needs.

I loved the album and lived with it almost exclusively for months. To this day, putting it on both plunges me back to that specific time in my life—before marriage, before kids, before mortgage payments, before a steady career—and reminds me of what a powerful statement Mann made right out of the gate.  

But that doesn’t mean I proved to be the most loyal fan. Mann has had a rocky career, marked at first by rancorous public clashes with her record companies, who expected her to sell more records than she did and responded by being difficult and unsupportive. That led to some long gaps between releases, and then to muted promotional campaigns for her albums and singles. This became the norm once she went fully independent with her third album—the magnificent Bachelor No. 2 (2000)—and lacked corporate backing to help get the word out.

My life has also seen rocky patches, both at work and at home—and times when I haven’t paid close attention to new music. I’d always notice at some level of awareness that Mann had a new album coming or freshly released. Usually I’d buy and make an effort to listen to it, but often the effort was half-hearted and fleeting. In most cases, one or two songs made a lasting impression; occasionally it was three or four. As the years and the decades flew by, that added up to a decent-sized list of songs that meant something to me. But they never seemed to really shake me awake, or demand my full attention. Mann was mainly supplying background music to the episodic unfolding of my life.

Renewed Appreciation

This finally changed a few years ago, when my brother (my closest musical confidante and a talented singer-songwriter himself) began raving about Mann’s 2017 record, Mental Illness. This was the first of her albums, released five years after the previous one (Charmer from 2012), that really hadn’t registered with me at all. I heard my brother’s praise and made note of it. But it took several more enthusiastic comments from him over the next few months to convince me to take a close listen.

When I finally did, I was blown away.

In many ways, it was like what I remembered from all of her previous records: intricately crafted, melodic songs wedded to deeply thoughtful, meticulously constructed, and sadly sardonic lyrics. But something had also subtly shifted. Most of the songs were now ballads, quiet, reserved. There was little electric guitar. The arrangements beautifully embellished the folk-based songs by blending acoustic guitar, piano, rich vocal harmonies, and a small string section.

It was an album of stunning beauty, emotional intimacy, and vulnerability. And I couldn’t get enough of it. I craved more. So I did something that, for me, is pretty unusual: I went deep-sea diving back into Mann’s career, paying special attention to the albums she had released since my attention had begun to flag. What I discovered is that, although her art had indeed reached a new standard of refinement and excellence on Mental Illness, she’d consistently been operating on a much higher level for a much longer time than I’d realized.

Every album contains treasures, with gems scattered across its distinctive musical landscape. Yes, she takes her time—in the old days she took three years between releases; over the past decade it’s become four or five—but the results always display songwriting craftmanship on the highest levels.

In my research into Mann’s past, I also learned more about her personal life than I’d ever known, including her recurring struggles with serious anxiety and depression. And how both were made worse by those early conflicts with record companies. And how the roots of these difficulties could ultimately be found (as they usually are) in childhood traumas, including her parents’ rancorous divorce, which led to an episode well summarized in an LA Times story from three years ago:

Her parents divorced when she was 3, after which Mann’s mother and her new boyfriend kidnapped Mann. They took her to Europe and traveled around. Mann’s father was searching for her via a private detective for nearly a year when she was found in England and returned home.

“By the time I saw my father again, it was like he was a stranger, and then I didn’t see my mother again until I was 14,” she says. “I think having two parents where you spend so much time away from them, and then they just don’t seem like parents anymore—that lays the groundwork for later problems.”

Given my kindred childhood traumas—including maternal abandonment and, before that, my mother’s own hapless attempted kidnapping of me and my brother—reading this account was a revelation. It also allowed me to see that Mann’s songs can be understood in part as chronicles (in the form of telegraphic short stories written in verse) of her own path across the same scarred and cragged emotional terrain over which I have stumbled all my life.

How could I not feel a special bond with Mann and her work?

Gratitude

There are any number of possible entry points to Aimee Mann’s remarkable body of music. One great place to start is her most recent album, Queens of the Summer Hotel (2021), a baroquely orchestrated song cycle inspired by the novel Girl, Interrupted. (Given the subject matter—a teenage girl’s experience in a psychiatric hospital—the album might have been titled Mental Illness 2.) It’s an exquisite piece of work, filled with dark beauty and wisdom, showing that Mann, now in her 60s, continues to work at the top of her game. Here’s “Burn it Out,” one of my favorite tracks off the record.

I also remain especially fond of Bachelor No. 2 and the songs she contributed to the soundtrack of the P.T. Anderson film Magnolia from 1999. The latter songs have since been added to the track listing of the former album, which was originally released the year after the film appeared, so focusing on that 2000 release now opens up a rich world of eighteen 4-minute masterpieces.

There’s “Red Vines,” which I fell in love with the moment I first heard it. In a just world, it would have been a Top 10 hit and widely known by everyone who appreciates good music. Mann herself had commercial ambitions for it while she was recording the album, but her label at the time (Geffen Records) seemed intent on proving their cluelessness, and it went nowhere on the charts.

There’s also “Save Me,” a tightly coiled track that has become one of her most popular songs on streaming services. It has some of the most efficient and powerfully suggestive opening lines I’ve ever seen:

You look like
A perfect fit
For a girl in need
Of a tourniquet   

But all these years later, I think the song on the record that hits me the hardest in emotional terms may be the closing track, “You Do.” By all means, read the lyrics I’ve pasted in below, but I hope you’ll also listen to Mann sing them accompanied by the hauntingly beautiful music, which fit the words perfectly.

The song is so deceptively simple. Just three short verses and a chorus, with a one-line bridge, all sung from the standpoint of a woman listening to and observing her friend desperately hoping for love from a man the narrator bluntly pronounces a “jerk.” There are hints that this is a pattern for this friend—and maybe has been for the woman singing the song, who has learned hard lessons about the futility of seeking fulfillment in trying to become what she imagines will make her worthy of love from someone incapable of giving it. Apart from potential abuse and painful disappointment, it can lead a person to lose herself, which might be the most heartbreaking possibility of all.

Nearly two and a half decades since I first heard this song, I still feel a trap-door open up beneath me every time Mann reaches the final chorus to once again sing the title line, which, following the set-up of the third verse, hits with incredible power, like a ball-peen hammer to the heart.

“You Do”
Artist/songwriter: Aimee Mann

You stay the night at his house
With no ride to work
And I’m the one who tells you
He’s another jerk
But you’re the one who can succeed
You’ve only got to prove your need,
And you do
You really do

The sex you’re trading up for
What you hope is love
Is just another thing that
He’ll be careless of
But though there are caveats galore
You’ve only got to love him more,
And you do
You really do

Even when it’s all too clear

You write a little note that
You leave on the bed
And spend some time dissecting
Every word he said
And if he seemed a little strange
Well, baby, anyone can change
And you do
You do
You really do

Lyrics © Downtown Music Publishing

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Aimee Mann’s catalogue is filled with songs of that quality—and she played several of them opening for Jason Isbell last Friday in Philly. Now in my mid-50s, I look back at the life I’ve lived up to this point and realize I’ve had companions on the journey. Not just family, friends, and professional colleagues, but also artists, like Mann, who have touched me deeply with their work down through the decades.

Thank you, Aimee, for being there and for sharing your art with us for all of these years. May there be many more still to come. I’ll be listening, as I so often have, and still do.