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Features What A Mann! Sunday, July 13, 2008 Aimee Mann’s inimitable personality shines through on her latest album @#%&! Smilers. By Martin Jones
Aimee Mann is one of those rare artists who seemed to emerge with her own style. The voice at the centre of Boston’s The Young Snakes, and post-punk ‘Til Tuesday and their MTV sensation ‘Voices Carry’ bears the same unmistakable deliberation of Mann’s subsequent solo work.
While Mann has become a renowned character writer, her empathetic portraits and vignettes reaching an unprecedented audience in her soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia, musically Mann has remained idiosyncratic.
Mann converses in the same measured, laconic, wry cadences with which she sings and in which her songs unwind. Clearly it’s her musical expressions, more than the content of her lyrics, in which the listener can find the most accurate translations of Mann’s personality; her music is an ingenuous extension of herself rather than a costume.
That doesn’t mean that Mann is unwilling to try on a new pair of musical shoes every now and then. Indeed, the album bio for her latest recording @#%&! Smilers hails it as “a return to form after… artistic detours,” those “detours” being the Joe Henry produced concept album The Forgotten Arm, and Mann’s 2006 Christmas album One More Drifter In The Snow.
Titled after a term conceived to describe those who condescendingly demand a smile and tell you ‘cheer up’ when it’s the last thing you feel like doing, Smilers was produced by Mann’s bass player Paul Bryan who also produced the Christmas album. While Mann talks about chasing a different sonic palette rich with keyboards and strings, and attests the characters and stories are more fictional than on previous work, such adjustments will seem minor to most. It sounds undeniably like an Aimee Mann record, and that’s my point.
This album is heralded as a “return to form after artistic detours”. How do you feel about that comment?
That comment came from my producer Paul Bryan. Because I had asked him, you know ‘what’s your impression of the record’ and he actually said that. So I thought, ‘well, you know…’ I mean I’m not an objective judge of music. I can’t really hear it like anyone else would hear it. The things that seem different to me probably wouldn’t really stand out to anybody else. So, you know, I trust his opinion.
And you know, the last record, The Forgotten Arm – well actually the last record was the Christmas album and obviously that was a detour – but Forgotten Arm was a bit of a detour because it was a concept album and a kind of a different band, different guitar player. But I never really know if sonically that’s noticeable to other people…
Every album of yours shares such a distinct personality, ideally what role to you like to give to the producer when making each album?
I tell him the kind of thing I’m going for and then the two of us figure it out together. But he does most of the work that I’m too lazy to. So he will pick the music and direct the musicians and decide when it’s a good guitar take or whatever, and I’ll have opinions, but it’s easier for him to say that than it is for me. It’s easier for me then to concentrate on the singing.
That said, there seems to be a kind of ‘one of the gang’ role to your producers too… they’re more often than not playing in the band rather than the traditional me v them role.
Oh absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re always part of the band… except for Joe Henry. But you know he’s so one of the guys too. Yeah, I mean I like to be friends with my producers…
How much of a lasting influence has John Brion had on you in terms of arranging and recording in the studio?
John is such a great musician, that just being around him makes you a better musician. And kind of soaking up his mindset makes you a better arranger. I definitely became a better bass player listening to him play. I think our musical influences are very similar and our melodic sense is very, very similar… yeah arrangement-wise and production-wise and playing-wise he’s been very, very influential. And he’s just inspiring. He makes me feel like, I don’t know, like you really do become a better musician. He’s very encouraging of other people; he likes you to try new things.
That’s quite a talent, because as such an accomplished musician he could actually be quite intimidating.
Yeah it’s interesting, because he’s so good but he never makes you feel like ‘oh why bother trying because he’s so much better.’ I mean maybe that’s just my attitude, I’m sure there are people who are like ‘god damn him, I’ll never be as good!’
The album press release has you quoted talking about the instrumental arrangements in great detail… do you consider that detail crucial in making a great record?
Well, like musical details like little parts?
Well even that sonic palette that you were talking about.
I do, I do, you know it all contributes, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be thought out and planned out. A lot of times it just happens and it’s about being on site when it happens and saying ‘oh that’s great, don’t change anything’. You know it’s just not getting in the way, that’s such a huge part of making a record.
I read a review of a recent concert that made an interesting point: that your songs take on a greater power when presented in a context, like as part of a theme or, in the most obvious example, part of a film like Magnolia.
Well I can’t think about it too much because there’s not that much control that I have over it. But it certainly was obvious to me that with Magnolia the context was a brilliant director, a brilliant young interesting new hip director, saying ‘pay attention to this, this is important, this is cool, this is good.’ And in that context, people are able to view it in a different way. So I do think context is important, but hard to control. So it doesn’t really bear worrying about that one. If it happens it happens and sometimes it’s just zeitgeist – sometimes people are just in the mood for you, and sometimes they’re really not in the mood. Sometimes they’re like ‘oh singer-songwriters, I’m so bored with that!’ And they’re onto another thing and when they get bored of that, they’re like ‘you know what I’m in the mood for? A singer-songwriter.’ So if you’re lucky you can catch that wave.
I’m sure your songs have been adapted to all kinds of contexts; adopted as soundtracks to countless breakups, romances, road trips, whatever….
I have been told that, many times, that, you know, ‘oh your record is the soundtrack to our breakup’. I don’t know if that’s such a great thing, but if they don’t mind I don’t.
Do you have your own strong contexts for each of your songs, or does that get blurred as you rehearse and record and perform them?
Uhhh, it gets blurred. Yeah it gets blurred and then I kind of reinterpret it as I’m singing songs on the road and then going into different experiences… you know I’ll sometimes have those moments where I’ll go ‘oh this is just like what I’m going through with this person. I guess this can apply to this situation.’ There is, every now and then a song gets really deeply buried in a context and it is hard to play.
Hard to play?
Yeah. I know this sounds kind of weird but there was one song on Lost In Space, I don’t even want to say what it is, not that it matters, but there’s one song on Lost In Space that when I was mixing it, I happened to be reading this book and it was like a true crime book and I think I thought it would be interesting, but I didn’t realise how horribly violent it would be. I kind of accidentally just found myself reading it and it was a case of this young girl who was abducted and raped and murdered and it was so… like while that song was playing I was reading this passage and you know how sometimes you read something and before you realise it it’s poisoned your mind? It’s like ‘oh Jesus!’ It was describing this rape and I was like ‘oh God, I wish I didn’t fucken read that’. And I could not listen to the song after that. It got tainted by the horror of that thing that I read. It’s such a weird thing isn’t it, how memories can get associated in your brain and it’s really hard to separate them again?
What context comes to your mind when you think of Smilers, does it suggest a particular place or time or event or people to you?
Umm, it’s more that it has a certain kind of feeling that I don’t know that I could really put into words, but I think the songs are a little bit more like short stories, where maybe they’re a little bit more fictional, you know where I didn’t have to rely so heavily on some emotional experience of mine in the past. Yeah, actually, in a funny way this record is kind of light-hearted – it is kind of smiley in a way for me.
@#%&! Smilers is available on Ryko through Stomp.
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