THE SONG SOMMELIER

Words & curation by Keith, cover portrait by Mick, as ever!

Like many other people I guess, I first paid attention to Aimee Mann’s music in the cinema, during the ‘existential epic’ film Magnolia. Hearing the piano chords and the high pitched croon of Wise Up, I was immediately drawn in by just how distinctive that song is. The tracks Aimee wrote for the Paul Thomas Anderson Magnolia collaboration so perfectly captured that film’s mood, it gave Mann’s music (and career) a new lease of life. She subsequently released herself from Geffen Records and created her own label, SuperEgo Records, with Michael Hausman, her manager. In doing so, Mann became something of a pioneer for the self-releasing indie artists - who could find international success through making records on their own terms. Indeed, after languishing somewhat following the two early major label releases, the first album Mann created under her own steam, Bachelor No. 2 is seen as a masterpiece by many fans (it contained four tracks from the Magnolia film and so was a counterpart to it in some ways). 

On two further occasions, I simply became hooked on Aimee’s music - both when situated in North American as it happens. Firstly in Toronto, 2002, where I was hosting a conference, with all the responsibility you have to make sure everyone has a good experience and nothing goes wrong on your watch, I needed a sort of talisman soundtrack and that turned out to be Mann’s fourth outing, Lost In Space. I had it on heavy rotation for the whole period during the trip and for a while after. The songs were never out of my head.

I had become addicted to what was a concept album about addiction. 

The second time was a couple of years later, but now I was catching up with Aimee’s previous record, Bachelor No. 2. It was a weekend in LA - again on ‘business’ but then subsequently, I hooked up with a close friend who was out there at the same time, and it turned into something of a lost weekend involving copious quantities of gin. Somehow Bachelor No. 2, with its air of tainted cynicism and self-loathing (it was themed on Mann’s bitter experience of being within the major label system), was the perfect soundtrack to a bar crawling, boozy weekend in sun-soaked LA. On what is my favourite track on the record, It Takes All Kinds, Aimee laments on the first two lugubrious verses:

As we were speaking of the devil
You walked right in
Wearing hubris like a medal
You revel in
But it's me at whom you'll level
Your javelin

I'm surprised I even thought I
Had half a chance
I was just one in a million
Of also-rans
Who was sure to be your victim
Of circumstance

If you hear those words doled out in Aimee’s cynical tones while sitting by a motel pool nursing a seedy hangover, you are hearing them in the perfect context. I still don’t quite know which of those two classic albums I prefer. Lost In Space is a more complete experience, but ‘Batchelor’ contains some belters - Red Vines, Deathly, Driving Sideways. 

But Lost In Space is an immersive listening experience, if difficult at times - and it is more adventurous sonically. It contains a huge cast of some fabulous side players too, with superb lead guitar playing by Michael Lockwood. Some of the songs are fine examples of Mann’s melancholic, ironic and observational lyrical style, and beautiful too: Today’s The Day and It’s Not being prime examples. Lost In Space received some mixed reviews, and like Mann’s overall style, can be seen on the surface by some to be - dare I say it - boring - mid-tempo and unvaried. This misses the point. Like the best music, the songs on Lost In Space grow and grow on repeated listens, and reveal new things each time. Since I recommend you spend time with the whole album, I’ve included in this collection a few of gems that were not on the official version but found there way onto the ‘deluxe’ edition as extras: the cover of Coldplay’s The Scientist (that it sounds like an Aimee original is a massive compliment to both Aimee and Chris Martin!), along with Fighting The Stall, and Nightmare Girl.

It’s not always easy to enter Aimee Mann’s musical world. Musically, you need patience, to have faith that the songs will grow on you if they don’t grab you first time (not all her songs can sound as immediately arresting as Wise Up). Lyrically, to enter Mann’s world is to look into the truth, no matter how hard. Her songs insist that you face up to the sum of your parts, and realise you might be found wanting. If you don’t like it, lump it, or change it. As Aimee puts it in Today’s The Day:

Better pack your bags and run
Or stay until the job is done
Baby you could sit and hope
That providence will fray the rope
And sink like a stone
Or go it alone

More inspiring still perhaps, is that more than a decade on from Lost In Space, last time out - Aimee made what is without doubt my favourite record of hers - 2017’s bleak but contemporaneously titled, Mental Illness. It is a gentle beast of a record, full of heart-stopping ballads in the 70s soft-rock and folk mould (since Mann had become influenced by that scene - Bread, Janis Ian, Caravan and the like) as she was making the album. For a society so desperately in need of rehab, it’s the perfect soundtrack for 2020 and I still play it regularly three years after its release. Try the subtle but powerful refrain from one of its standout tracks, Rollercoasters:

So high as you fell looking down on the tops of the trees
And all you can do is say
Please, please, baby please
Please, please, baby please

In-between my favourites I’ve stuck alongside Aimee over the years, loyally committing to the previous three albums: The Forgotten Arm (a 2008 concept album set as a musical movie/novella of a down & out boxer and his long suffering wife Caroline), 2008’s @#%&*! Smilers (pronounced Fucking Smilers just to be clear) and then in 2012, Charmer. None of those three records quite gripped me in the same way Lost In Space did but contain fine songs - particularly Little Bombs, Stranger Into Starman and Little Tornados. All included here.

Likewise, Mann has never quite gripped me when I’ve seen her play live. Impressive sure, and with a witty banter so rare these days, but somehow not quite delivering those songs to their full potency or poignancy. Perhaps next time, I certainly hope so. And Aimee, I promise to hang on your every word.