"She was always a kid that was kind of ahead of her time. She was always a kid who had her own mind. … She was a kind of an insecure kid, very quiet, very introspective. … I liked her a lot. When she did start talking, she was worth listening to."
Katherine Baugher, Aimme Mann's drama teacher at Midlothian High School in the mid-'70s
If Ms. Baugher's recollections of Aimee Mann as a child are accurate, Mann appears to have been remarkably consistent throughout her life. Since leaving her record label to strike it out on her own as an independent artist, she's been praised again and again for her precise, literate, understatedly eloquent, insightful and poetically devastating songwriting skills - which have earned her comparisons to Elvis Costello, Difford & Tilbrook, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, and Andy Partridge. As AllMusic's Robert L. Doerschuk observed, "Mann remains spectacularly underrated among contemporary songwriters; no one surpasses her as a master of poetic regret".
Mann's songs might strike the casual listener as being unusually 'serious' and 'depressing' - a reasonably accurate judgment, given that she returns often enough to emotional perils and pitfalls of adulthood (instead of the hedonistic recklessness and carefree-ness of adolescence and young adulthood, which is what many pop hits are made of). Mann's ouevre explores themes of alienation, desire, self-delusion, confusion, vulnerability, failure, and isolation; this blog post is dedicated to examining Mann's artistic treatment of loneliness throughout several albums.
"Guys Like Me" is a track from Lost in Space (2002), a mid-tempo track that involves Mann's psychological astute lyrics evoking the social detachment and emotional disengagement of non-alpha type men that society is quick to dismiss and ignore:
'Cause guys like meWe all vow to becomeClear and free of the fife and the drumAnd block the circulation till we're all completely numb'
Lyrics: Genius
"Lost in Space", the titular track from the same album, is far more cryptic and abstract. Here, Mann's presents an interior psyche marked by deep, intractable (and somewhat inexplicable) apathy - masked by an ability to 'pretend to care':
'Lost in space above all driftingTo a place where planets shiftingThe moon erased, it's features liftingThe glare
But I am the stuff of happy endingsThough mostly bluff, belief suspendingBut close enough for just pretendingTo care
And I'm pretending to careWhen I'm not even thereGone but I don't know where'
Lyrics: Genius
"One" is a track from Mann's Oscar-nominated soundtrack for Paul Thomas Anderson's critically acclaimed film Magnolia (1999) (which he described as an "an adaptation of Aimee Mann songs. Like one would adapt a book for the screen, I had the concept of adapting Aimee's songs into a screenplay"). It's a cover of a 1968 Harry Nilsson song and a number's game which establishes loneliness as a mathematical property:
'One is the loneliest number that you'll ever doTwo can be as bad as oneIt's the loneliest number since the number one
"No" is the saddest experience you'll ever knowYes, it's the saddest experience you'll ever knowBecause one is the loneliest number that you'll ever doOne is the loneliest number that you'll ever know
It's just no good anymore since you went awayNow I spend my time just making rhymes of yesterday'
Lyrics: Genius
And finally, the career high of "Save Me", another stellar track from the pop-folk Magnolia soundtrack. Mann voices an (articulate) inner monologue irreversibly marked by a lifetime of isolation, a schizoid soul from 'the ranks of the freaks/ Who suspect they could never love anyone' desperately pleading for emotional connection:
'You look like a perfect fitFor a girl in need of a tourniquet
But can you save meCome on and save meIf you could save meFrom the ranks of the freaksWho suspect they could never love anyone
Cause I can tellYou know what it's likeThe long farewellOf the hunger strike'
Lyrics: Genius
