SOUNDTRACK: AIMEE MANN-Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo (2000).
Aimee Mann writes really pretty (often sad) songs. From seeing her play live (in person and on video), she is very upright when she plays. And I feel like this uprightness comes forth in her music. She is very serious–not that she isn’t funny, because she can be–but that she is serious about songcraft. Her songs, even when they are catchy, are very proper songs. I don’t know if that makes sense exactly.
It also means to me that most of her music sounds similar. She has a style of songwriting and she is very good at it. For me, it means that a full album can start to sound the same, but a few songs are fantastic.
“How Am I Different” opens up with a super catchy melody and a guitar hook that repeats throughout. “Nothing is Good Enough” is a bit slower and less bouncy. But “Red Vines” brings that bounce back with a super catchy chorus (and backing vocalists to punch it up). The piano coda is a nice touch.
“The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist” starts slow but adds a cool guitar riff as the bridge leads to a catchy, full chorus. “Satellite” slows things down as if to cleanse the palette for “Deathly.”
Now that I’ve met you
Would you object to
Never seeing each other again
The chorus is low key but the verses have a great melody. It stretches out to nearly six minutes, growing bigger as it goes with a soaring guitar solo and better and better rhymes.
“Ghost World” has some wonderful soaring choruses while “Calling It Quits” changes the tone of the album a bit with a slightly more jazzy feel. It also adds a bunch of sounds that are unexpected from Mann–horns, snapping drums and in the middle of the song, the sound of a record slowing down before the song resumes again. It’s probably the most fun song on the record–unexpected for a song with this title.
“Driving Sideways” seems like it will be a slower downer of a song but once again, she pulls out a super catchy intro to the chorus (with harmonies) as the rest of the chorus trails on in Mann’s solo voice as we hang on every word. It ends with a tidy, pretty guitar solo.
“Just Like Anyone” is a quiet guitar song, just over a minute long. It’s a surprisingly complete song and shows that not only can she pack a lot into less than 90 seconds, she should do it more often.
“Susan” is a surprisingly boppy little number that bounces along nicely on the two-syllable rhythm of the title character. “It Takes All Kinds” slows things down with piano and gentle guitars and “You Do” ends the album with Mann showing off a bit of her falsetto.
This is in no way a party album, it’s more of a quiet autumn day album. And it’s quite lovely. Thanks, Nick, for reminding me of it.
[READ: May 20, 2019] “It’s a Mann’s World”
Nick Hornby wrote High Fidelity and became something of a musical expert because of it. As such, he wrote a half a dozen or so musical review sections for the New Yorker.
This was his first and, as one might guess from the title, it is about Aimee Mann.
He begins by talking about the British magazine Mojo and how every month they ask a musician what he or she is listening to. He says that many musicians of a Certain Age seem to have abandoned rock and roll and are listening more to jazz or classical. They are doing this “for reasons I can only guess as: Prokofiev! Ellington! Take that Hanson and Wu-Tang Clans fans! ”
These performers seem to suggest that pop music is dead. Much in the way that people say fiction is dead. Meanwhile good, talented musicians continue to make albums that people continue to listen to and good talented authors continue to write novels that people continue to read.
He mentions a bunch of new albums that are terrific in the old-fashioned verse/chorus/verse way. The kind of music that The Beatles or Marvin Gaye used to make. Terrific music in which all that was missing was the shock of the new.
Then there is Aimee Mann,
a fine, occasionally brilliant singer-songwriter, nothing more, nothing less, and this plainness of purpose has cost her dearly over the last fifteen mostly calamitous years.
A brief summary of the fate of ’til Tuesday and how she now hated “Voices Carry.” She had tried to turn the band into something else but failed to win any fans. Five years later she released her first solo album “Whatever” just as her label collapsed, more or less consigning it to oblivion.
Hornby says that Mann’s ‘trouble” is in the musical world is that she doesn’t compartmentalize well:
she writes her own songs and sings them, but she is not what we’ve come to expect a female singer-songwriter to be. She plays guitar, not piano, but she is not one of the lads, like Sheryl Crow, she is outspoken rather than introspective, which means that she has little in common with the Carole King school and she is much to grown up and circumspect to want to bare her pain in the way that Tori Amos and Fiona Apple.
But thanks to Paul Thomas Anderson, Mann wrote the music for his film Magnolia which he claimed was just an adaption of Aimee Mann songs. She was nominated for an Oscar for the music for the film, but she lost to Phil Collins (“a hilarious case of cloth-eared injustice”).
Now she has released Bachelor No.2 which shares song from the Magnolia soundtrack that came out a few months ago. (“Like London buses, you wait for three years and two turn up at once”).
It was supposed to be an internet only release but the success of Magnolia brought her more attention.
Some people don’t like Mann’s “self righteous sense of grievance” (Griel Marcus described her: “still whining after all these years.” Hornby retorts that if her songs are whiny, who doesn’t feel like whining sometimes? (Besides, just look at Positively 4th Street, “it’s one long, glorious unresolved moan”). Now, if you could only have one album a year maybe you’d pick something happier. But there are thousands of albums released each year and few are as rich and thoughtful as this one.
He looks into some lyrics and says
her bleak and bracing cynicism about our ability to connect with fellow-humans remains gratifyingly intact…. In Man;s world other people are very much in the wrong. … Mann’s arguments are geometrically unique in possessing only one side.
How’s this for an elegant lyric:
As we were speaking of the devil / you walked right in / wearing hubris like a medal
And, he says he has read entire novels that cover this territory less effectively than the verse of “Ghost World.”
Finals blew, I barely knew my graduation speech
With college out of reach
If I don;t find a job
It’s down to dad and Myrtle Beach
He says that “The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist was written with Elvis Costello. This makes a ton of sense because there is a lot of similarity between Mann and Costello’s later, softer output. It’s great that Costello is able to put out records as he likes and get accolades for them. It’s a shame that Mann doesn’t have the similar good fortune.
Since 2000, Mann has put out a few more records, each one beautifully crafted and distinctly Aimee Mann-sounding. But since 2012 she has only released one. Wonder what she’s up to.
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