Interview w/Aimee Mann

Onstage at the Calvin Theater in Northampton, MA, Aimee Mann-mature, wry of tongue and profoundly low of key-is an epoch away from "Voices Carry," the embarrassing, codependent masterpiece that put her-and the anonymous legion of New Wave Babes who didn't know they were her fans-on the map in the mid-80s. When she went from a whisper to a scream in the song's final chorus-"He said shaddap! He said shaddap! Oh God can't you keep it down!"-suddenly it was okay to be damaged, Communion-eyed-pretty and traditional, even under a spray of spiky white punk hair and tomboy duds. But by 1985, when "Voices Carry" was sluicing through the veins of every secretary on Boston's Red Line, Aimee (and her band, Til Tuesday) were ripe for slaughter and one-hit-wonderdom: Gang Green immediately did its own shouty cover of the song, revealing that the local knuckleheads loved feminine hysteria just as much as their girlfriends did.

Time passed, and Aimee ate more genius pills, grew up and put a lid on her overt hostility. No wonder her camp appeal plummeted and her ticket to word of mouthland was summarily punched. So what can one do when the emotional hangover has been slept off? She was all poise on Til Tuesday's stark "Coming Up Close" (a yellowed photograph of Dylan tapes, hotels on the highway and borrowed cars, good enough to make Stipe scratch his scalp), and her cameo vocal on Rush's somewhat codependent "Time Stand Still" was an elegiac closure to the 80s. Four-eyed Geddy Lee fans dreamed about her big eyes and long body.

And then she went way underground. Solo albums ensued. Then the Magnolia soundtrack happened. Fair-weather fans slunk back to her again, although there was nary a hit in sight. And now here, in the shabby chic of the Calvin, a large, once-splendid movie theater that has almost been restored to its former glory, she's promoting a new solo album to an almost packed house.

Aimee is now beautiful, with lank cornsilk hair, and in her irreverent blazer, jeans and sneaker ensemble she embodies all of Cheap Trick. She is not about to sing an old song about a man holding her tongue down. She's an epoch away from "Voices Carry."

But then again, she isn't. She prefaces the second encore with a good-natured "Don't fuckin' make me do it!" directed at someone 10th row center. "I can't believe you mentioned that song. I'll do it, but it might not be good." And the band sidles into a deeply unplugged version of "Voices Carry." By the time she hit the first lyric, the entire crowd is going ape. It's the last song I expected her to perform, and it occurred to me that no one, for the entire length of the show, had yelled out "Voices Carry" as a request. And this was one vocal crowd. It was as if the audience was collectively holding its tongue. It also occurred to me that Mann probably yells out "Don't fuckin' make me do it!" just before the second encore at every show. It doesn't matter that she needs some kind of excuse to put the song on the set list. To hear the mature Aimee perform "Voices Carry" makes me-and the rest of the audience-absolutely giddy.

"In the era of Duran Duran it was inevitable," says Aimee in a phone interview earlier that day. I had just asked her how she felt about her humble beginnings as a synth-pop babe. "If you were playing music [in the 80s] that was kind of what you leaned toward. And it was fun for a while. But I feel like now I've settled into what I do best."

Describing what Aimee Mann does best is impossible, but you know it when you hear it. Her speaking style gives some clues to her strength: casual, singsongy, awkwardly direct, breezily unpretentious. So unpretentious, in fact, that she can get away with saying things like, "I write stuff that's very melancholy but not usually in a strict minor key," or describing her process as "internal songwriting." In the liner notes to the Magnolia soundtrack, director Paul Thomas Anderson described Mann (who performed all of the songs for the film, thereby making Magnolia somewhat substantial and watchable) as being "a great articulator of the biggest things we think about."

"Well, you know, that's superflattering," she says of the compliment. "I wouldn't want to deny it, because it would be great if it were true." She gropes about with some ums and you knows. "I think an important goal of songwriting or any artistic endeavor is to try to articulate things that are more difficult. Those confusing, amorphous states that are harder for people to bring up or describe."

Lost in Space (SuperEgo Records), her latest solo album, is a dark stare in a sunlit room, littered with substance abuse, relationship junkies and the "reverse pyromaniacs" who get the pity party started-it's the typical Aimee troika of "depression, mood-altering and addiction," as she puts it, delivered in her slightly nasal, warm and friendly voice without even the smallest stain of personal catharsis or hauteur. How else could she take lyrics like "So baby kiss me like a drug/Like a respirator" and make it sound like a Carpenters cover?

Me: "What was your mood when you were making Lost in Space?"

"Surprisingly cheerful, considering the material. But my mood and the material don't necessarily have to relate."

"I thought so. Did your mood matter at all?"

"If you're writing about darker periods in your life, or trying to connect more dysfunctional things if you're writing about someone else, I think it helps to feel kind of clearheaded, stable and optimistic, because it gives you a more stable platform, you know, from which to observe."

Somewhere close to the middle of her set at the Calvin, Mann digs into her best material from Magnolia: the wee, glorious "Wise Up" (a required piano ballad for anyone who pinballs between rehab and assorted hard surfaces) and "Save Me," which torques the Jerry Maguiresque nightmare of being completed by a lover into a macabre gibe: "You look like a perfect fit/For a girl in need of a tourniquet." A middle-aged white man (all of white Northampton is in the audience tonight, by the way) sitting behind me is suddenly snapped out of his trance and starts droning on about "instant gratification." Getting some of this seems to be a major concern for Mann fans. Not getting it seems to be a concern for Mann, who appears to be content cataloguing other people's dramas. If her observation deck were any more stable, she'd be in danger of disappearing, or becoming the Meryl Streep of pop singer-songwriters-so talented, so wholesome and in her command of the craft she's totally fucking boring. Luckily, Mann hasn't totally left her muzzled, insecure New Wave Babe persona in the dust.

"You've obviously gone through some dark periods in your own life," I venture.

"Yeah, I've definitely gone through some periods of depression."

"How much of your material is autobiographical?"

"There are probably very few things that are strictly...in fact, I would say that there's nothing from beginning to end which is strictly autobiographical. A lot of times there will be other people I'm sort of curious about, and I'll write a song about them in the first person to try to get inside their head and relate to them in some way."

"Is there anything you have to prove or improve?"

"I don't really have the mindset of feeling that I have to prove anything. For me it's always interesting to try to become a better songwriter and be influenced by a variety of things. But I think that those influences are more subtle at this point. It can be a chord change that I've heard in a song, rather than stylistic things that are immediately apparent."

"Is it always that subtle?"

"I don't know, it depends. By and large it's just me sitting around with a guitar and playing something I like the sound of, and it reminds me of a certain mood, and how would I describe this mood, and try to come up with a concrete picture of how the scenario would be to create such a mood...and that's how I go about it."