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Aimee Mann
In 2000, singer/songwriter Aimee Mann released, Bachelor No. 2, her critically-acclaimed third solo album and the first release on her own SuperEgo Records. It was no small feat. After years of much-publicized battles with major labels over the direction her music should take, the former leader of the 80's band Til Tuesday and writer of the hit, "Voices Carry," emerged as a victor in more ways than one. Always an independent-minded artist, for the first time Mann was an independent artist in the truest sense. There was more than a little poetic justice when she earned an Oscar nomination for her song "Save Me" from the movie Magnolia, a film that was inspired by a collection of her songs.
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In January, Mann returned to New York City with her husband, singer/songwriter Michael Penn, for a performance of their popular "Acoustic Vaudeville" show which features Mann and Penn each performing their own songs mixed with the comic musings of a guest comedian.
You came out of the so-called new wave movement, which sometimes had more to do with fashion and image than with music. When did you start to feel that your songwriting was important?
When we first performed as Til Tuesday, I didn't really know how to write songs. The band I was in just prior to Til Tuesday was very atonal, so there was no system. It wasn't almost as if we avoided anything that appeared to be songwriting craft. I eventually got tired of that and wanted to start writing songs. But like any skill, you have to really practice it. You have to do it a lot to even get to the point where you know what you want to do, or what you're good at.
What was the first song that you wrote that you were proud of?
In Til Tuesday I was just starting to write songs, and starting to write lyrics. If I could make anything sort of rhyme, I would be impressed with myself. But I didn't really think of the quality. "Voices Carry" is pretty much the first song that I wrote by myself.
Do you remember studying the works of any individual songwriters as you began to develop on your own?
I never really did that. If I really liked something, I felt that I was in too much danger of rewriting part of it into my own song. So, I was never someone who learned Beatles songs and played along with the records.
A majority of your songs are bittersweet, melancholy tunes. Why is that?
It is what I like. If something sounds too happy, too major, it just sounds fatuous. On the other hand, if something sounds too minor, that doesn't sound good to me either. Like "The House of the Rising Sun" always bothered me because it is so relentlessly minor key. It doesn't set up an atmosphere that is interesting to me.
You have a good-sized catalog of songs behind you now. Is it more challenging to sit down and write something fresh, or do you have little tricks that you use to force new ideas into your songwriting?
Sometimes I do have tricks. I haven't written a song in a year, because I've been on the road, trying to promote my record. The larger challenge is to find the energy and the time to write. There are four progressions that I use all the time, but I know I can't keep falling into them, so I do play games with myself. Michael and I had formed a little, informal songwriter club with our friend Buddy Judge, and we would get together and come up with goofy ideas. One of my things was to write chord changes on little pieces of cardboard and throw them in the air, and whatever cards landed face up, there's your chord progression, get to work. We would never really use it, because it was always terrible. But maybe by eleminating one chord, and then repeating another chord, you could come up with something that is interesting.
Has the Magnolia experience made you want to do more work for film?
Absolutely. It was a great movie, and it is very gratifying to be part of something that's good.
The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, said that he created the story lines in the film from listening to your songs. Were there actual characters based on your songs?
I think he did. I'm sure he was listening to some of the songs and that in turn gave him an idea of his own. The characters do have parallels, but I would say that his characters are much more chaotic, then the people that I would be thinking of. But they are in the same ballpark.
What inspires you?
I'm a person who is very interested in other people, mostly my friends and family, and I'm interested in people's behavior. I also think that messed-up people are most interesting, and there's a lot of them out there.
Are you working on anything new now?
I haven't written in a long time because I've been touring. It's just not possible. You're too exhausted. You can't anxiously process lots of detail and write at the same time. For me, writing requires a lot of silence and boredom. My advice for anyone who wants to be a songwriter is turn off the TV and isolate yourself for two weeks.
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