Mann tells Kaysen’s stories over piano and woodwind, the elegant instrumentation plotting the distance between her tormented characters and the expected feminine archetypes of the era to quite beautiful, devastating effect. When the pandemic stalled the play, Mann turned the songs into her new record, Queens of the Summer Hotel. “What’s the big thrill – getting to see them bite their lip when they come?”) (“I’ve never understood this ice queen thing myself,” wrote the critic Robert Christgau in 2002. It’s so obviously in my wheelhouse and I’d written about this stuff before.” Mann’s last album, released in 2017, was called Mental Illness, a joke at her dour reputation – one largely imposed on her by men perplexed by this drily funny woman with no taste for sugarcoating. “I was off and running before there was a script.
Mann read it and “started immediately having ideas for scenes”, she says. She isn’t at all cagey in person, but funny and sharp as she reflects for two hours, until her stomach rumbles for breakfast.Ī few years ago, the film producers Barbara Broccoli and Fred Zollo approached Mann about writing the songs for a musical of Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir about her institutionalisation in McLean psychiatric hospital, in Massachusetts, in the late 60s. “As I’ve gone on, it’s more interesting to see how my past experience can inform a song, but it’s not necessarily about me,” says Mann. Misunderstood by their label, the group ended, then Mann spent the 90s with her first three solo albums of brilliantly spiky, weary, erudite guitar pop mired in major-label politics, from collapses and buyouts to brazen apathy at what to do with a late thirtysomething classicist more akin to Randy Newman than Britney Spears.īy the millennium, Mann had quit to start her own label, SuperEgo, where she has remained, releasing wryly tragic character studies of people doomed to self-sabotage. With her shocked peroxide do, rat-tail plait and unyielding stare, Mann resisted sexual and commercial commodification. In 1985, Mann’s band ’Til Tuesday had a US Top 10 hit with their debut single, Voices Carry, a sublime new-wave anthem about the liability of expressing emotion. When it comes to her career, the 61-year-old songwriter has never been one for the hard sell.
“I’ve actually bought several things from Instagram ads,” she says sheepishly. She admits, with a whaddaya-gonna-do shrug, that she bought the Alexa Chung garm off Instagram. “So it’s been hard to get going.” Drab weather demands good knitwear, and Mann has paired thick-rimmed round glasses the size of ashtrays with a brown woollen sweater vest. “It has that six-in-the-morning feel,” says Aimee Mann, eternally droll, from a home office wallpapered in fruity foliage. I n Los Angeles, it’s early and overcast.
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