This story is featured in CityBeat’s Feb. 21 print edition.
Has it really been four decades since Aimee Mann broke into wider consciousness with the MTV hit “Voices Carry?” Mann wrote the tune for her band at the time, ’Til Tuesday, a Boston-based pop-rock outfit with a penchant for ear-wormy, synth-aided hooks and glossy overproduction. Mann went solo after three incrementally more interesting but less commercially successful ’Til Tuesday albums, kicking off a run of singer-songwriter efforts that continues to this day.
If Mann’s recorded output has slowed in recent years — she’s dropped only one album, 2021’s Queens of the Summer Hotel, since Barack Obama left office — she remains a compelling live presence, her lanky frame and literate lyrics as consistent as the changing of seasons. The slackening is in part related to a nervous system disorder that prevented her from listening to music for a year after COVID surfaced, which is not an ideal turn of events for someone buoyed by the creation of sounds.
“Music immediately makes you feel something,” Mann said of her artistic mode of choice in a 2023 interview with Salon. “There’s no lag and there’s not a lot of subtlety. It’s almost like it forces you to feel the thing. As soon as you hear it, you can feel the thing that the person who wrote it felt, to a certain extent. If you hear Chopin’s funeral march, you’re like, ‘I feel a sense of dread.’ So, music to me is a kind of sorcery because it’s so immediate, and then the mixing of language together with it.”
Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo — which surfaced in 2000 following Mann’s ace contributions to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia movie soundtrack — remains her creative peak, a mood-altering mix of folky chamber pop and seemingly first-person storytelling. For those unfamiliar with her brand of lacerating lyricism, try this from the opening of Bachelor No. 2’s “Deathly”: “Now that I’ve met you/Would you object to/Never seeing each other again?” Translation: Proceed with caution.
Aimee Mann plays Memorial Hall on Feb. 28 at 8 p.m. Info: memorialhallotr.com.
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This article appears in Feb 21 – Mar 5, 2024.