Entertainment Weekly - September 3, 1999

September 3, 1999

SECTION: MUSIC: Hear and Now; This week on the music beat

LENGTH: 210 words

HEADLINE: Mann Overboard

BYLINE: By CHRIS WILLMAN

Aimee Mann-- the poster girl for acts dropped by Interscope Geffen A&M after the Universal merger-- has signed a deal with the company to buy back Bachelor No. 2 for a low six-figure sum. She'd almost completed the album for Geffen in '98 before new management rejected it as uncommercial. Ironically, her label struggles may have afforded Mann her highest media profile ever. Sans publicist, she's garnered a mountain of press, including a New York Times Magazine feature. And it took a mere eight gigs on her mostly sold-out summer club tour to run through a 1,500 pressing of a $10, seven-song "preview edition" of Bachelor-- her way of leaking the material to impatient fans while negotiations with Interscope dragged on. "I'm so relieved to be out" of the major-label business, says Mann, who plans to release the album herself this fall. "I'm a million times happier, playing for myself and having nobody criticizing the way I'm touring or what I say in interviews. It's incredibly liberating." But before they join in her ebullience, Universal's other droppees should know she has a benefactor they can only dream of: Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson has scored his highly anticipated film Magnolia with seven Mann songs, Graduate-style. We should all be so rejected.

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