Mann Up: Singer-Songwriter Shares Insight into Her Oeuvre 

Aimee Mann’s gift for literate lyrics that belie the bright melodies of her chamber folk-pop music has defined her own genre for more than 30 years of a solo career. 

Her oeuvre is the vulnerable truth laid bare, mostly drawn from her own experiences, but in such refreshing ways that it’s decidedly universal, and healing rather than depressing. That gift is readily apparent in two choice songs from Bachelor No. 2 from a quarter-century ago, remastered and re-released in 2020. 

“Now that I’ve met you/Would you object to/Never seeing each other again,” she sings in “Deathly.” “‘Cause I can’t afford to/Climb aboard you/No one’s got that much ego to spend.”

In “How Am I Different?” Mann also dives right in: 

“I can’t do it, I can’t conceive/You’re everything you’re trying to make me believe

‘Cause this show is too well designed/Too well to be held with only me in mind.

How, how am I different?”

Mann has largely moved within the same territory ever since, with the occasional left turn into writing about others’ plight, even if her full output only comes to less than a dozen albums. Yet the wit in her wry melancholia has only become an even more emotionally lethal “sugar-coated poison pill” as the New York Times put it. 

Mann returns to Santa Barbara for the first time in nearly a decade with a show at the Lobero on October 30, with singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton as opener and band member. She shared about her songwriting and more over the phone last week. 

Q. Your songs seem to get inside of the guts of a relationship or situation with plain language that’s spot on and packs a wallop. What’s that process like for you, and how has it changed over the years?

A. When I first started writing songs, I was either really inspired and a song just came out, or I’d have an idea about what I wanted to say and just try to write it the best I could. But I really didn’t have the tools for generating ideas or getting around a problem… As I get older I realize that I get inspiration just from sitting down and trying to work, and if I run out of steam, I know how to switch it over into the workmanlike part of it that keeps the inspiration going. It makes it easier to finish and more likely that I’ll be happy with what I come up with. 

So it’s more of a circular process where you are not quite so much at the mercy of the muse because you have the crafting ability to keep going and have it re-inspire. 

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

What about the knack for finding words that rhyme that don’t compromise intent for the sake of rhyming. How hard is that for you to do? 

That’s also gotten easier with experience because part of your brain is always working on it in the background. There’s certain tricks, or rather rules, that I’ve realized help the process. You don’t want to telegraph where you’re going, and the listener subconsciously realizing there’s only one rhyme left. The idea is to walk up to it so it’s still a surprise, and the listener is drawn into the song itself rather than what the rhyme might be. 

But it’s hard. Sometimes I think the most valuable thing that I have (as a songwriter) is that I’m willing to step back, read what I’ve written, and say, “I could see that rhyme coming a mile away. I have to change it. “It might be a pain in the ass but you have to avoid what I call the cram – that thing when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle and you keep trying to cram a piece that doesn’t belong there just to finish it. I want it to be natural and conversational, which means it also can’t be super tricky to say, or a convoluted mouthful of consonants. It also can’t be a cram syllabically, where the emphasis is on a syllable that it wouldn’t be in speech. 

There’s many, many, many songs where I could not solve that puzzle and I had to bow to my limitations. But it’s easier now, and the puzzle is much more fun. 

I’m almost afraid to ask how melodies fit in the puzzle. How do you marry the word and the music?

To me, the melody follows what you’re saying. You try to keep the cadence of speech and put the emphasis where you want it, maybe with a pause. So it’s usually just what occurs to me. Maybe that’s the talent part of it, but to me it’s more about paying attention to the intent of the words. 

Your last album Queens of the Summer Hotel was composed for an anticipated musical adaptation of Girl, Interrupted. How was it for you to take on existing material like that?

It was fascinating to ask where I intersect with this person or this situation, and can I just inhabit their point of view entirely. It was a good reminder that my songs don’t have to be 100% my own experience. A different narrative illustrates your own feelings better than you can. In some ways it’s easier to write a fake thing. 

You’ve recently won some Grammy awards. Years ago, NPR called you one of the 10 best living songwriters along with McCartney, Dylan, and Springsteen. Critics trip over themselves with praise. What do such accolades mean to you? Are they validating? Thrilling? Embarrassing? Meaningless? Or? 

Probably a mixture of all of those. It is very flattering to have somebody think that I’m in the pantheon of great songwriters, but at the same time, you remind yourself that it’s one person’s opinion, and most people still have no idea who you are. Which is fine, because ‘Til Tuesday was one of the first bands to become really highly visible from a video on MTV. We were recognized all over the place. It’s not particularly fun. It’s really awkward to have someone follow you into the bathroom to talk to you, or come up to you in an airport and say you look familiar, are you somebody? Which is a question nobody should ever have to answer. So I was relieved when it faded a few years later. 

Now YouTube has made so many more people famous that I have no idea who they are. The conveyor belt keeps moving past. I don’t need to be in the game. My ambition is to keep writing and making records.