LENGTH: 924 words
SECTION: Pop Arts: Music
BYLINE: Dave Itzkoff
HEADLINE: Mann on the Move
After years of being under the thumb
of her labels, Aimee Mann gives corporate rock the finger
Aimee Mann has been reborn so many times now, she practically qualifies
as a Buddhist. Since she split from 'Til Tuesday, the made-for-MTV band
she fronted in the '80s, legal and financial snafus have twice damned her
to career purgatory. This year, Mann should have ascended to chart-topping
heaven: After surviving the Universal/Polygram merger that cost nearly 200
of her labelmates their recording contracts, she headlined the second stage
of this summer's Lilith Fair and was due to release her third solo album,
Bachelor No. 2, in the spring. But when Interscope, the Universal
subsidiary she had been passed to, told her they "didn't hear a single:
on the new record, Mann told them to take their multinational conglomerate
and shove it. Will she spend another 40 years wandering the desert, or will
she finally make it to the promised land?
How can someone so talented, so respected by her peers, and so attractive
have a career so screwed up?
A lot of things went wrong. Besides having my records held hostage by labels
that merged or went bankrupt, record companies would consistently see me
as having the potential to be a real sellout. People looked at me and said,
"Wow, if you dressed her up, she'd be pretty hot," and they just
couldn't let that fucking go. I never looked to them like Leonard Cohen
or Elliott Smith or Joni Mitchell. I looked like Roxette.
How are you going to sell the new album without the label's support?
Will you just drive up to Tower Records with a bunch of CDs in the back
of the station wagon?
What we're going to do-- and when I say "we," it's just my manager
and I-- is not worry about having some big, obvious release. I'll sell records
at shows, because that's always fun. People can buy it on the Web from Aimeemann.com
or download it from Artistdirect.com. I'm sure we'll be able to get distribution
and major stores. If it's too much work-- and it probably will be-- we'll
find a smaller label and sign a deal with them.
Do you realize you've waved good-bye to any possibility of commercial
success?
I'm one of those people who just cannot handle success anyway. It requires
not only stamina but an ability to put on a false face 24 hours a day. I'm
not a schmoozer. If I don't know you, I don't fucking know what to say to
you. I'm not being a dick-- you're just a stranger, and I'm racking my brains
for clever comments, but I'm not that fast on my feet.
So how do you handle yourself onstage?
It's difficult to know what to say between songs. I'm no good at banter,
but I have so many friends who are comedians, I get one of them to do banter
for me. They'll come out and say, "Hi, I'm Aimee Mann," and tell
some story about the next song, whether they actually know what it's about
or not.
Now that you've moved to L.A. and you're doing music for movie soundtracks,
have you gone Hollywood?
I haven't been to any parties. I am involved with Magnolia, a Paul
Thomas Anderson movie coming in December, so I've been to the set. I hung
out with Tom Cruise, which is about as Hollywood as you can go. But he's
got to be the most charming person I've ever met-- so charming you're almost
suspicious. He's so attentive, you feel like everything you say is witty
and fascinating.
You have actor friends, musician friends, and comedian friends. Do you
have any friends who aren't in the entertainment industry?
I have a friend who's a librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
She actually went to school for it. And I have a friend who's getting here
master's in psychology.
Is there anything you'd like to study?
I want to take piano lessons because I don't play keyboards at all. It's
very hard for me to understand having different hands playing melody and
harmony-- it's a split in the brain that I don't have. I want to take a
self-defense class. Not just for defense, but for the fun of kicking the
shit out of a guy in a padded suit.
How did you write the last song you wrote?
I write a song when there's some kind of persistent emotional feeling that's
stayed with me for a while, that I'm sort of chewing on. The last one I
wrote I'm calling "Ghost World." I had just read Daniel Clowes'
graphic novel Ghost World, which is about two girls who have just
graduated form high school, and it was one of the best things I've ever
read in my life. Then, when all the stuff with Interscope was going down,
I had a persistent feeling very similar to the one I had when I graduated
from high school, which is, What do I do with my life now? Maybe I should
just forget music altogether and do something else.
What would you do if you suddenly packed it up?
[Husband and fellow singer-songwriter] Michael [Penn] would like to have
a kid. There's that idea. But I don't go into anything large like that without
doing some kind of research. I've never really felt babies were cute. I
guess they're cute, but they're not that much cuter than real people.
They're supposed to be cute. It's supposed to trigger a mothering instinct.
Boy, I hope so.