Copyright 1993 BPI Communications, Inc.

BPI Entertainment News Wire

May 21, 1993, Friday

LENGTH: 427 words

HEADLINE: Aimee Mann sheds old persona for new clip

BYLINE: By DEBORAH RUSSELL, Billboard

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES

BODY:

She's not the typical woman one ordinarily sees in music video. She's fully clothed, she wears little makeup, and she's got a sense of humor.

Her name is Aimee Mann, and her debut solo video, "I Should've Known," is an offbeat celebration of the freedom that comes with the end of a bad relationship.

The scene opens on a casually clad Mann collecting the possessions of a former lover - jockstrap and all - running out into the snow, lighting a bonfire, and prancing about with a bottle of champagne.

"It's unusual to see a woman in a video who isn't portrayed as a bimbo or as some 'tough chick,' " says director Katherine Dieckmann, who made her directorial debut with R.E.M.'s "Stand" and whose other credits include videos for New Order, Indigo Girls, and Throwing Muses.

But in this video, Mann portrays no one but herself. It's a switch from the persona she had created as the lead singer of 'Til Tuesday, and puts the final touch on her re-entry onto the video airwaves after a hiatus from the public eye.

"Aimee wanted to break out of the whole 'Til Tuesday image of the heartbroken, lovesick girl raging about relationships," Dieckmann says. "So we decided to treat this breakup with some black humor. I was pushing more of the angry woman thing with the whole burning of the boyfriend's stuff, but Aimee wanted it to be funny, like 'thank you; you did me the biggest favor by leaving.' "

Mann truly is flying solo in the video; she is the only person who appears on screen. Dieckmann and a skeleton crew spent two days shooting the charming, low-budget clip in an empty house on a lake outside the director's hometown of Ithaca, N.Y.

"We wanted to shoot down south and have a spring feeling," Dieckmann says. "But then we got hit with the storm of the century and we couldn't really go anywhere that wasn't covered in snow anyway."

Icy exteriors feature a freezing Mann riding a bicycle, playing air guitar, and planting artificial sunflowers in a thigh-high snowbank.

Her only true co-stars in the clip are a trio of Charlie McCarthy dummies, which happen to come from her own collection. In fact, most of the props in the video, except a specially created Monopoly-esque board game named "Monobstacle," were culled from Mann's possessions or from the belongings of crew members, friends, and other Ithaca locals.

"Aimee is an extremely intelligent and funny woman" Dieckmann adds, "and that hadn't come through in her public persona until now."

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