No singer/songwriter bums out more beautifully
than Aimee Mann. Since her early days fronting ’Til Tuesday,
she’s lanced every painful carbuncle on the dark side of
romance while administering megadoses of pop narcotic. With each
new batch of transcendent downers, she manages to become more and
more herself, an unabashed classicist and classic depressive who
major-to-minors her way to bittersweet, Beatlesesque bliss. It
would be unfair to say that Mann repeats herself —
isn’t that true of any artist with a distinctive style?
— but her aesthetic template has remained the same for the
past couple of decades. Those in search of rump-shakers and
certified party-starters should look elsewhere, because Mann, bless
her gigantic broken heart, won’t deliver. She named her
record label Superego, remember, not Id.
The Forgotten Arm, Mann’s fifth solo release, is a collection of
dysfunctional love songs. The same could be said of her previous
records, of course, but here the familiar subject matter is
presented from a different angle: the time-honored concept-album
conceit. The CD’s dozen story-songs follow a more-or-less
linear narrative about a junkie boxer and the woman whose love
can’t save him from himself. (In case you’re tempted to
interpret the songs as confessional, the lyric booklet contains the
standard disclaimer: “The characters and events portrayed in
this book are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance to persons
living or dead, or similar situations, is coincidental.”)
Escape, both literal and figurative, is Mann’s great theme,
the source of all her best metaphors, and the album’s
road-tripping protagonists, John and Caroline, are only the latest
iterations of this idea. They meet, fall in love, take off, commit
various acts of codependency, fall apart, and come together again
(well, sort of — Mann doesn’t really do happy endings).
The plot is almost dopily simple, especially by concept-album standards, but
it focuses the songwriting, freshens the details, and gives old tropes
a novel punch.
The record offers a few other surprises.
Producer Joe Henry steered clear of the baroque ornamentation and
meticulous overdubs that characterized Mann’s previous work
with Jon Brion and Michael Lockwood. Instead, he had her record the
whole thing in five days, almost entirely live and with a new band
(including keyboardist Jebin Bruni, Sheryl Crow alum Jeff Trott on
guitar, and bassist Paul Bryan). The sound, which Mann has
described as “Mott the Hoople meets alt-country,” has a
dreamy, dated quality, with ’70s rock guitars and the extreme
stereo panning of a Beatles album. Although the arrangements are
undeniably pretty in their own right, their best attribute may be
their unobtrusiveness, the way they let Mann’s silken alto
dominate the mix. It’s a gorgeous smear of a voice, breathy
and a little ragged at the high end, dark and thrummy toward the
bottom, and it’s nice to hear it nearly naked for a change.
The highlight of any Aimee Mann album,
however, is the songwriting, and The
Forgotten Arm is no exception.
“The King of the Jailhouse,” a sweet Muscle Shoals
shuffle with yearning boy/girl harmonies, slide guitar, and a
killer horn hook, is a study in languorous soul. “She Really
Wants You” pairs a lilting vocal melody with glorious
McCartneyish bass runs, and “That’s How I Knew This
Story Would Break My Heart” fulfills the promise of its
title. But it’s the closing track, with its buzzy guitar,
chiming piano, and reckless generosity, that lands the knockout
blow: “Sometimes it hurts me to feel so much
tenderness,” Mann sings in a frayed falsetto.
“Beautiful — I wish you could see it, too — baby,
how I see you.”
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2005.
