Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing
PLC
The Independent (London)
May 18, 2000, Thursday
SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 11
LENGTH: 1551 words
HEADLINE: AIMEE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD;
IT SEEMED LIKE THE OLD, OLD STORY. AIMEE MANN WAS
ADORED BY CRITICS AND FELLOW MUSICIANS, BUT WAS A PUZZLE FOR RECORD COMPANIES.
THEN HER SONGS INSPIRED A MOVIE, AS SHE TELLS ANDREW GUMBEL
BYLINE: Andrew Gumbel
BODY:
Strange things happen to people who listen to the music of Aimee
Mann. Perhaps it is the mellifluous beauty of her songs, or her
dazzling command of harmonic progressions, or the crisp, cool melancholy
of her voice, or the burning honesty and linguistic playfulness of her lyrics.
Or perhaps it is her iconic status as a poete maudite of modern rock, adored
by the critics and by fellow musicians, but apparently condemned to drift
through the limbo of the recording industry without ever quite finding the
audience she deserves.
Whatever it is, it draws people to her like ancient Greek sailors to the
Sirens. People don't just listen to Aimee Mann, they become
obsessed. Cameron Crowe, the film director and former rock journalist, is
one such fan. So is Liz Phair, the singer-songwriter, who knelt at Mann's
feet when the two of them met at a concert a couple of years ago. And so
too is Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Boogie Nights and Hard Eight,
whose recent film Magnolia puts her songs at the very heart of his fresco
of restless characters cracking up over the course of one day in Los Angeles's
San Fernando Valley.
The duplicitous, apocalyptically tinged world that Anderson conjures up
is ideally suited to Mann's temperament. Songs such as "Wise Up",
which is used as a chorus for the main characters at the nadir of their
disparate emotional journeys, or "Save Me", an extraordinary anthem
of despair and redemption, illustrate the persuasive power of Mann's songs
to engage and move her audience.
They might also just be the spell-breaker to end Mann's appalling run of
luck. For more than 10 years, ever since she left her Boston-based band
Til Tuesday to establish a solo career, her rich talents have been consistently
let down, not to say sabotaged, by record industry executives unable to
hear anything in her music except the lack of an obvious marketing strategy.
Twice, she found herself in a particularly pernicious form of musical hell,
in which her record company would neither agree to release her songs nor
allow her to look elsewhere for another label. Twice, she fell victim to
corporate mergers that simply hung her and her music out to dry.
But now Magnolia has drawn a new, enthusiastic audience and won her nominations
for both the Golden Globes and the Oscars. At the same time, she has managed
to break free of the record companies and issue Bachelor No 2, her first
studio album in five years, on her own label.
Although she is hardly the next Britney Spears, she is selling more records
than ever, thanks in large part to the internet. And in the UK, Bachelor
No 2 is currently the number-one seller on amazon.com's online retail service.
Mann herself is laconic about this swing in her fortunes. "Magnolia
has certainly brought in a new audience," she says cautiously. But
she remains daunted by the process of "orbiting around this music industry
sun" and the obstacles constantly put in the way of the one thing she
wants to do, which is to write and play the music that comes from her heart
and her gut.
And it is no wonder: as little as two years ago, she was being told that
her new songs were "unreleasable", because the honchos at the
Geffen label, where she was signed, "didn't hear a single" (a
line that inspired her bitingly satirical retort "Nothing Is Good Enough",
which features on Bachelor No 2). She was told to write more commercially,
but without anyone specifying exactly how.
Mann was so desperate that she seriously considered giving up the music
business altogether. "My discouragement level was really, really high
- alarmingly so," she says. "There's nothing noble about persevering
in a ridiculously futile circumstance. You think, 'if nobody cares I ought
not to be doing this'. Of course, there are people who care, but they're
not at your record company."
Mann was saved by the support group of musicians and friends she had built
up in Los Angeles, many of them gravitating around an intimate club called
Cafe Largo in the Fairfax district. She and her husband Michael Penn played
a regular gig there on Tuesday nights; other performers included Elliott
Smith, Fiona Apple (Paul Thomas Anderson's girlfriend) and Rufus Wainwright.
Admired by a number of Hollywood players, they were periodically commissioned
to provide songs for films: Smith won an Oscar nomination for his work on
Good Will Hunting, while Mann herself had a song in Cameron Crowe's Jerry
Maguire.
Anderson was a personal friend and enough of a fan to pester her regularly
for sneak previews of her work. "If I'd written a new song, he'd say,
'play it for me, play it for me'," Mann recounted. "I didn't take
the interest to be professional, at first. Things developed in an organic
sort of way."
In particular, a demo tape of the song "Deathly" so impressed
Anderson that he used it as the basis for the character Claudia, who takes
refuge in drugs to mask her fear of relationships with men. As the script
developed, so did the music. "Like one would adapt a book for the screen,
I had the concept of adapting Aimee's songs into a screenplay," Anderson
writes in his sleeve notes for the Magnolia soundtrack. "She was articulating
feelings and ideas better than I ever could and I wanted to rip her off."
While the film was coming together, Mann's contractual status was falling
apart. Geffen was bought out by Polygram and folded into Interscope, a label
specialising in rap music; Polygram, in turn, was then bought out by the
Universal Music Group, which set about dropping scores of artists from its
rosters. Partly thanks to Magnolia, Mann was emboldened, along with her
manager, to buy back her material and issue it independently under the SuperEgo
Records imprint.
Bachelor No 2 reprises three songs from Magnolia - "Deathly",
"You Do" and "Driving Sideways" - along with 10 others
mining familiar Aimee Mann territory: the disappointments of unreliable
relationships, the anger and insecurity that they generate, the sense of
being adrift and alone. That may sound depressing, but in common with Mann's
two earlier albums, Whatever and I'm With Stupid, her style covers a wide
range from the emotionally intense to the downright jaunty.
Musically, she manages to devour an eclectic range of influences, from the
tunefulness of the Beatles to the hard-edged rock of the Pretenders, by
way of bluesy alternative country and - especially on the new album - Burt
Bacharach.
She has also collaborated with Elvis Costello (with whom she co-wrote her
Eighties hit "The Other End of the Telescope") and Chris Difford
and Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze.
Her assured reworking of these disparate inspirations has only caused her
material to improve over the years. One can't help wondering, in fact, if
the frustrations she suffered at the hands of record producers didn't inadvertently
turn her into a better artist. One of her earliest solo songs was already
called "I've Had It"; on the new album, the theme continues with
some raging lyrics on "Nothing is Good Enough" ("Critics
at their worst could never criticise the way that you do/ No, there's no
one else, I find, to undermine or dash a hope quite like you/ And you do
it so casually too").
Mann acknowledges the autobiographical strain in her work, but rejects the
idea that personal misfortune has somehow been her most reliable muse. "Nobody's
life is perfect," she says. "There are always things ranging from
the irritating to the downright painful, like losing a parent, or being
stuck in a job that sucks the soul right out of your body. This sort of
difficulty and anguish is a subject worth contemplating in itself. In my
songs I like to get to the bottom of things and see if there is some core
truth to get out. I really enjoy using language in an interesting way. All
of this adds up to better song-writing."
Plenty of people in the business will tell you that Aimee Mann is difficult,
or withdrawn, or a poor communicator. In person, she is quite the opposite
- personable, smart, unpretentious and without bitterness. If she's happy
about her current success, it's as much for the freedom it has given her,
as it is about fame or recognition.
She is about to embark on the biggest US tour of her career, playing to
larger houses in more cities than ever before. To alleviate Mann's awkwardness
with on-stage banter, she and her band of musicians - including her husband,
Michael, and her long-time guitarist and backing vocalist Buddy Judge -
are hiring a succession of stand -up comics to do the talking for them.
If the gimmick works, she might consider bringing the show to tour Britain.
Further down the line, she hopes to form a collective called United Musicians
that would pool the resources of like-minded artists to record and distribute
albums over the internet. She never imagined herself as an entrepreneur,
but this project might be just the thing to rescue the airwaves from its
relentless diet of mindless rap and teeny pop.
Of course, now that she is tasting success, the record companies are rushing
to woo her back. But she's not tempted. "It's way too late for that,"
she says wryly. After a decade of frustration, she has music to make and
no more time to waste.
http: / aimeemanndirect.com/
GRAPHIC: The use of Aimee Mann's music in 'Magnolia' has
drawn a new audience and won her Golden Globe and Oscar nominations
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