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Aimee Mann

Aimee Mann

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Bernard Zuel
August 17, 2009

Give up, says Aimee Mann, give up now. Don't fight it. You aren't going to win so rather than bemoan your lack of power, embrace it, celebrate it and build on it.

She means it too. The Oscar-nominated Wise Up, Mann's best known song, makes this point very clear. That song, the emotional centrepiece of Paul Thomas Anderson's astonishing sprawling epic, Magnolia, is sung by each cast member, from Tom Cruise and Philip Seymour Hoffman to Jason Robards and Julianne Moore, in a devastating, heart cracking scene which turns on the lines “It's not going to stop/till you wise up/no it's not going to stop/so just give up".

You might think this kind of attitude would be depressing, a defeatist's mantra. You might especially think this if you knew that Mann, who had moved from mid-sized Richmond, Virginia to Boston in her late teens; had started her career with a hit (the 1985 synth pop mini-drama Voices Carry by her group Til Tuesday) but then was systematically screwed over by three different record companies for ever diminishing returns. It got so bad that by the late '90s she was forced to buy back her third solo album, Bachelor No.2, just so she could release it on a tiny, self-funded label.

But on the eve of her first Australian tour, the willowy American singer-songwriter, who will turn 49 next month but looks to have barely aged in the 10 years since Magnolia revived her career, will tell you that if she's learnt anything from the music industry and its seemingly inevitable companion, years of psychoanalytical therapy, it is that giving up is in fact liberating.

"I think it's a core problem with everybody, a certain amount of denial and misapprehension about how things work and how much you can apply your will to the outside world and expect it to bend. Or even to the inside world and expect it to bend," Mann says. "There's a certain amount of constructive quitting where you stop trying to figure out how to make sense of crazy and there is this weird paradoxical thing that happens once you know you really don't have any control where for some reason it gives you a measure of control."

It's not about giving in, it's more about knowing which fights are worth having and which ones are just examples of bashing your head against a wall for the sake of it. Or as she puts it, “standing up for what's appropriate."

And looked what happened to her when she did that: Bachelor No.2 and the Magnolia soundtrack (which shared a number of tracks) became her best-selling albums; she's released three more albums without resorting to signing a major label contract; and along the way she's set a standard of fierce intellect and equally fierce independence, for a younger generation of female artists, such as Missy Higgins.

"One of my favourite birthday presents of all time was seeing Aimee Mann play in Central Park, NY when I turned 20,” the Melbournian Higgins says. “There's a kind of non-fussed, slightly disinterested charm about Aimee that I think drew me to her music.”

If a certain kind of ferocity was all it was underneath Mann's often melancholy music, the songs would be of limited interest eventually. But there's a combination of storytelling and melodic invention in her work which speaks longer and more tellingly. Australian producer and musician Matt Fell describes Mann as "equal parts Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and early Elton John. With ovaries." Melodically it's certainly McCartney and Elton John and you could add that lyrically there's a fair bit of Elvis Costello.

The resulting material is often intimate and finely detailed, emotionally exposed and sharply perceptive. But while emotions are the centrepiece, after the personal lashings of her early albums, Mann these days tells her stories from a slight distance, observing these lives whether it's the drug addict boxer and his girlfriend in the concept album The Forgotten Arm or the friend trying to balance addiction and regular life in Freeway, from her most recent album, the wryly titled @#%&! Smilers (“I like reading addict stories,” Mann confesses.)

That style could set up some distance for a listener but as Suzy Connolly, writer and singer for the group Butterfly 9 whose work reveals a strong Mann influence, explains, Mann's songs don't lack for effectiveness or emotional kick.

“She is quite dry, more of a heady writer than someone pouring out from the heart but she fuses it quite perfectly and as a songwriter that's something that's an incredible ahcievement,” Connelly says. "Tom Petty does the same thing but he's much more minimalist. She always manages to tell brilliant stories and inject the perfect amount of whatever emotion it is. It's never just love, there are so many layers.".

You could also called it filmic given how she has fans in word-driven writer/directors such as Cameron Crowe (who used her songs in Jerry Maguire) Joss Whedon and John Wells ( who had her perform in their shows Buffy The Vampire Slayer and West Wing, respectively) and of course Paul Thomas Anderson, who didn't just use her songs but stole the opening line of one – “ Now that I've met you, would you object to, never seeing each other again" - for a key piece of dialogue in Magnolia.

Anderson has always been happy to admit just how influential Mann was in the making of Magnolia. “I wanted to just adapt Aimee's songs, like you would adapt a book or a play,” he said once. "One could do the math and realise that all stories come from Aimee's brain, not mine. Whether I'm directly quoting her or not, she creates the mood: falling in love, the hell of love, the fucking torture and great thing that love is - that's the basic stuff of Aimee's songs, and the movie is that all over the place."

Like Costello, with whom she has written several songs, Mann has been accused of a touch of misanthropy, a sometimes bitter appraisal of her fellow man. And not just the lowlifes at the record companies. It's not true, for there's equal amounts of sympathy and empathy with her oft-damaged characters. But maybe it's more reasonable to call it realistic, wanting to love and trust and to be convinced but prepared for the more likely scenario. (Though after several sometimes traumatic relationships with fellow songwriters Jules Sher and Jon Brion she has been happily married to singer/songwriter Michael Penn, brother of Sean, for a decade.)

Anyway, as she told me in 2001, bitterness can be fun. "I think it is funny. The whole idea of being bitter is funny. My concept of bitterness is the cranky old man, you know, 'Goddammit!' You can't really be lighthearted unless you're truly serious about something."

Otherwise you're just glib. "Glib is definitely not my cup of tea."

All of which might make it hard to understand why Mann has lived so long in glib city, Los Angeles. It looks not just the opposite of Richmond or Boston but the antithesis of Mann's philosophy on life. But she told me once that the community of comedians in which she mixed in that city had made life there more than bearable and that hasn't changed today.

"There's something to be said about having a common enemy to bond people together,” she says drolly. “Particularly if your common enemy is the world of morons. I'm not going to lie, it's pretty shallow [ in Los Angeles] and shallowness is not hard to find.”

As was obvious with @#%&! Smilers, self-mockingly named after a website set up for over the top venting by people who object to being forced to smile all the time, she still laughs. Sometimes bitterly but also with a sardonic appreciation for the absurdity of this life.

"I really am not bothered by anything since I got out of the major label system. It was like being in a dysfunctional family, like growing up with an alcoholic dad: you never knew what they were going to say; they always ordered you around but none of it made sense; you felt like you were living with crazy people,” says Mann. "Once I got out of that it was great, as long as I'm making a living and happy, I just don't care."

It brings to mind something Mann said to me 13 years ago, talking then about those who might deserve some revenge exacted on them but maybe more subtly than the knee in the balls or the glass of wine thrown over them at an opening night. As ever it was a case of giving up what couldn't be won but knowing what could be turned.

“I think that if songwriting is the only weapon I have, I'm fully prepared to use it if needs be. This is all I have. I don't have money, I don't have power, I don't have muscles. I can write that song."

Aimee Mann plays at the Enmore Theatre, September 4

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