As the singer and chief lyricist for ‘Til Tuesday, Aimee Mann had a big mid-1980s hit in “Voices Carry”. In the decade or so afterwards, however, she came to embody the archetypal critically hailed, commercially marginal singer-songwriter. After Geffen Records rejected her third solo album, Bachelor No. 2, Mann decided she’d had enough of trying to guess where her moody, often fatalistic songs fit into a major-label marketing plan. She founded her own imprint, SuperEgo, in 1999, and released Bachelor No. 2 herself. She hasn’t looked back since.
That same year, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson used several of her songs prominently in his film Magnolia, including “Save Me”, for which Mann earned an Oscar nomination. Since then, she’s released two more albums of original material, plus an unlikely Christmas album. At the end of 2006 and again in 2007, she hit the road with a Christmas show, featuring appearances by other musicians and comedians such as Fred Armisen and Paul Thompkins, modeled loosely after the “acoustic vaudeville” shows she’s been doing with musicians like Jon Brion, Fiona Apple and Michael Penn (to whom Mann has been married since 1997) at Largo, a nightclub near her Los Angeles home, for years.
This Saturday, she’ll return to the Birchmere to preview songs from Smilers, her new album due out in March.
DCist rang up Aimee in New York City earlier this week for a wide-ranging chat about the new record, the sweet science of fisticuffs, her burgeoning interest in Broadway and comics, and whether she’s really as much of a sourpuss as some folks seem to think.
So you’re playing the Birchmere on Saturday. This is a preview show for Smilers, your new record?
Sort of. I think what we’re gonna do is half new songs and half requests. It’s gonna be a bit of a free-for-all. I have just the trio, and it’s kind of fun to take requests when we have the trio, because the trio is lighter on its feet than when we have a full band. Fewer people have to remember stuff.
Who are the other two musicians who’ll be with you?
Paul Bryan and Jamie Edwards. Both of them played on the record, and Paul Bryan produced it.
Do you have a preferred method of taking requests? Should we just call them out?
We usually have people write them on slips of paper, and we’ll pass a hat or something.
Your last full album of original material was The Forgotten Arm in 2005. That one was something different for you: a narrative song-cycle about a boxer who falls in love right before he gets shipped off to fight in Vietnam. Does the new record, Smilers, have a storyline?
No. With Smilers, the “concept” is really just to have each song be as different as it wants to be, and not worry about any kind of through-line. The through-line is really just the vibe of the instrumentation and the production and the musicians. We recorded it pretty much live. We did some rehearsing to figure out what we wanted to do with arrangements and stuff. But aside from the string sections and horn sections that are on a couple of songs, we did it live in the studio. One or two takes.
Photo by Sheryl Nields; courtesy Michael Hausman Artist Mgmt.
