Copyright 2000 Pacific Press Ltd.
The Vancouver Sun
February 14, 2000, Monday, FINAL
SECTION: Entertainment; B7 / Front
LENGTH: 754 words
HEADLINE: Singer-songwriter refuses to become musically
extinct
BYLINE: Simon Hirschfeld
DATELINE: NEW YORK
BODY:
NEW YORK - Aimee Mann, a singer and songwriter
who has toiled in the margins of the mainstream music business, refuses
to go the way of the dodo bird.
Despite years of fighting record companies to be allowed to write songs
for their own sake, without worrying about topping the charts, she is staving
off artistic extinction thanks in part to a fruitful collaboration with
film director Paul Thomas Anderson.
''I find the dodo's story very appealing and I sort of identified with the
dodo at one point when I felt like the singer-songwriter was a dying breed,''
she said from her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband,
musician Michael Penn (brother of actor Sean).
Fans of Mann, 39, will finally be able to hear her long- delayed third solo
record, the first since the 1996 release of I'm With Stupid. Called Bachelor
No. 2 and subtitled the last remains of the dodo, it will initially be available
at shows and her Web site (http://www.aimeemann. com).
As ever, her biting lyrics can often be read as an indictment of her record-label
struggles.
''He's a serious mister, shake his hand and he'll twist your arm/With monopoly
money we'll be buying the funny farm/So I'll do flips and get paid in chips
from the diamond as big as the ritz/Then I'm calling it quits,'' she sings
on the new record over Beatle-esque orchestration.
The soundtrack to Anderson's Magnolia, an epic of lost souls with an ensemble
cast that includes Tom Cruise, Jason Robards and Julianne Moore, contains
nine Mann songs, several of them from the new album.
Anderson wrote the movie as ''an adaptation of Aimee Mann songs,'' he says
in notes to the soundtrack. Already friends, they began to exchange ideas
as he wrote the movie and she worked on new material.
''Everything she seemed to be thinking were things that I was thinking,''
he said.
''I don't know if I would've known unless he told me, besides the fact that
he quotes one of my songs in the dialogue of the movie,'' Mann said. (''Now
that we've met, would you object to never seeing each other again?'' Mann
asks in Deathly, a line echoed by a character in Magnolia.) But she agrees
that both her songs and the film deal with similar character types. Asked
to characterize them, she says: ''Chaotic, sad, lonely, desperate, pitiful,
brave, all of it.'' Alive, in other words. Mann takes pride in writing songs
that reflect life, as she views it, without oversimplifying.
She cannot say the same for mainstream American tastes.
''I think the national psyche is becoming more narcissistic because people
are becoming more and more immersed in the world of TV and movies and getting
much more of their ideas and philosophies from TV and movies that bolster
this unrealistic mythology about the way the world works,'' she said.
Although she has devout fans and has been a critical favourite, some remember
Mann only from Voices Carry, her hit with 1980s synth-pop band 'Til Tuesday,
which went to No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985 as her then spiky-haired
blond image graced television screens through heavy airplay on the MTV music
channel.
It was one of the first songs she ever wrote completely, Mann says.
For the second album, 'Til Tuesday switched to what Mann says were more
sophisticated acoustic-pop tunes, which perplexed their label, Epic Records.
Mann recorded three albums with 'Til Tuesday for Epic and then left over
creative differences as the band dissolved. It took three years for her
to get out of her contract, during which Epic would not let her record elsewhere
or release new material. In 1991, she released her first solo album, Whatever,
on independent label Imago. Then, before she could release her second, Imago
began to go under, and again the label's owner would neither release her
from her contract or put out the record.
I'm With Stupid was finally released in 1996 after it was sold to Geffen
Records. Then, as she began work on material for her third solo record,
Seagram Co. bought Polygram's musical holdings, including Geffen, and folded
them into its Universal Music to create the world's largest record company.
Mann was among the artists orphaned by the deal.
She is releasing Bachelor No. 2 on her own SuperEgo Records after buying
much of the material back from Interscope, the Universal unit to which she
was shuttled after the merger.
Magnolia, both the movie and the soundtrack, have won praise from critics,
and Mann just kicked off a spate of concerts with her husband.
GRAPHIC: CP Color Photo: MUSIC MANN: Aimee Mann has fought
record companies to make music the way she wants.
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