Mann Power

IT WAS a sublime enough moment as it was. A bright early Autumn evening heading back from a Monaghan field where Shamrock Rovers had just gone top of the League of Ireland for the first time in almost six years and all was well with the world.

It wasn't so much a case of hungry fiends screaming the apocalypse of clay from every corner of the land as thirsty fiends screaming the impending Hoops Apocalypse from every corner of a forty-seater coach when the driver switched the radio from the ultra-static of a fast-disappearing local station to wunnerful 2FM just as Aimee Mann's first solo single 'I Should've Known' kicked into gear. Oh happy day! Fairly put the seal on a sweet, sweet day.

That song comes from her debut solo album, Whatever, a record that's been entwining itself around whatever's left of my heart for the best part of three months now and I'm still playing the damn thing at least five times a week. Whatever would score highly on any critical checklist, its thirteen tracks overflowing with insistent melodies, imaginative arrangements, lyrics which are intelligent, incisive and immediate, all rounded off perfectly by Aimee Mann's innate grasp of how best to deliver a song. It's a staggering record (and Album Of The Year . . . so far, as if I need to state the blindingly obvious) which should enchant anyone with a smidgen of Pop sensibility and a semi-functioning set of aural organs, but for those yet to be seduced by Whatever I think a little background on the Bostonian artiste is in order.

Back in the early '80s there was a band called 'Til Tuesday whose debut album Voices Carry sold close on two million copies in the States. With Aimee on vocals and bass, the band specialised in streamlined, controlled Pop with a slightly futuristic edge which was quite fashionable at the time. Metaphorically speaking, you wouldn't kick Voices Carry out of the bed for eating cream crackers but it was with Welcome Home in 1986 that people began to realise that there was more to them than a way with a slickly crafted radio vehicle, as darker depths were explored in tandem with a maturing writing style.

But it was on 1988's Everything's Different Now that TT raced into the undying affections of a rapidly diminishing band of listeners. This Pop masterpiece - of which more later, you didn't think I was letting you off that lightly, did you? - appeared at a time when 'Til Tuesday's creative star was at its zenith but their public profile was reaching its nadir, and as for relations with Epic Records . . .

"I think that defines the music business," says Aimee Mann, looking even more striking in person than she does on her record sleeves, "the better you get the more afraid they are to support it. It was totally frustrating because I felt that I was making music that was much better than the first record and there was this reaction from the company along the lines of 'Let's wait and see what happens', as if it's possible to sell records when nobody knows you have a record out. We still managed to sell 350,000 copies of Welcome Home, which is pretty good considering we were virtually doing it on our own, and the third album sold 200,000 copies but yet that was considered an abject failure. So the obvious solution by the company was not to improve the execution of their job but to hold me to make another album, but this time I should be sensible and work with some other writers," she recalls, seething at the memory.

"If they'd dropped me I'd have been happy because I'd continually meet people from other companies who'd say 'Epic are doing an absolutely criminal job with 'Til Tuesday, contact us immediately they let you go'. But no. Instead it was suggested that I work with Diane Warren and Holly Knight and I'm sure if they'd have thought for thirty seconds more they'd have come up with Desmond Child," she laughs.

"They'd wanted me to write with Diane Warren for Everything's Different Now but I weaselled out of it. Unfortunately there's only so much weaselling you can do before the pressure is applied. They wanted a particular type of song that was on the radio at that time and having mega-hits. And Diane Warren has mega-hits because she has it written into her contract that her songs will be the first singles released off any album. So, then the record companies go (sarcastically) 'A Diane Warren song! Obviously this is a magical tune that will go straight into the Top Ten so we'll put all our support behind it'. Of course it goes straight into the Top Ten, anything would if a major label put their weight behind it."

In the past year or so practically every interview I've done with an Irish band has hinged around some form of record company strife - we're dropped/we're happy, we're not dropped/we're unhappy . . . you know the story just change the names to suit yourself - but the bitterness evident in Aimee Mann's voice as she recounts her wranglings with her former label is far and away the most virulent I've ever encountered.

"That dragged on for three years," she continues "and left me totally disillusioned with the record business. They finally let me go in 1991, at which point they obviously thought my career had been sufficiently ruined. You have an artist, don't like what they're doing, try to force them to do something else and then when they object let them languish in the dungeon. That really was their rationale: 'Suppose we let you go and then you sign a big contract and are successful. We'll look stupid'. How much of a lifespan do artists have that they can afford to have a chunk of three years taken out of their career? That's sheer evil!"

The circumstances which led to this hellish state of affairs for Aimee might be slightly easier to comprehend if 'Til Tuesday had delivered a stinker and expected Epic to try and sell it. Instead they gave them Everything's Different Now, a virtually flawless suite of songs dealing with the pain of a disintegrating relationship - in this case Aimee's faltering involvement with the songwriter Jules Shear - with the despair of the lyrics offset by ravishingly beautiful tunes.

Everything's Different Now is easily accessible on the most superficial level imaginable but once you scrape even a micrometre beneath its sparkling surface you're lost in layers of labyrinthine emotions - this really is an abattoir of amorous disillusion. At time almost unbearably sad - 'Long Gone Buddy', 'Crash And Burn' and 'J For Jules' - at others defiant virtually to the point of nastiness - the exultant 'Rip In Heaven' (which contains the outstanding lines "So long and sorry darling/I was counting to forever/And never even got to ten"), 'Believed You Were Lucky' and 'Why Must I' - the album also featured one of Elvis Costello's finest-ever lyrics on 'The Other End Of The Telescope'. It's a truly brilliant record and undoubtedly the best adult Pop album of the past ten years.

"There actually was a flaw on that record," Aimee concedes graciously, "the last song, 'How Can You Give Up?', doesn't fit with the mood really. It's a bit too 'up'." She's right of course. For nine songs you're trawling through catharsis and romantic carnage and then you end up with merely a very good Pop song, whereas what she really should have done is just stick on the last song from Welcome Home, the possessive-bordering-on-obsessive showstopper 'No One Is Watching You Now' ("I know that sadness bleeds through/And my sadness for me/Is now sadness for you/Cause I know no one is watching you now/Like I did" . . . this woman does not mince her words) as the closer . . . I know that's what I do every time I've had to tape the album.

And yet, can the raw reality of her delivery actually alienate people rather than draw them in?

"I've noticed that," she agrees. "I think there's a certain kind of person who gets nervous when confronted with anything personal and I understand that but I also feel that I don't really have time for that because life is too short, and if you avoid talking about things that are really important to you and are really important in other people's lives then you're going to miss out on a lot. You can only go for so long dodging and weaving before you have to confront important emotions and just let it out."

Five years after the personal and business trauma which surrounded and followed Everything's Different Now (available at a store near you, catalogue number EK 44041) Aimee Mann is back with Whatever. And if the former sounded like Blondie playing Berlin or ABBA tackling the third Big Star album then the new release is more in tune with the spirit of Parallel Lines or Arrival. The skill is as much in evidence as before but the mood is markedly more optimistic.

"Oh, I made a stab at optimism!" laughs Aimee. "I'm glad you think it's an optimistic record because nobody seems to think I'm optimistic at all. I definitely tried to bring that across more. I think I am a very optimistic person, that's why I'm constantly disappointed. I think people are good, kind and wise and they're always going to do the right thing because it's obvious that's what you're supposed to do. And then when people do the complete opposite it's flabbergasting. I'm bewildered by people, I don't understand why they behave the way they do. Then you start to wonder if most people are stupider than me, which is an awful thing to think."

Producer and multi-instrumentalist Jon Brion (who, astonishingly, has never produced an album prior to this) has crafted a warm and comfortable web for Aimee to weave around on Whatever. Nothing sounds forced or artificial and even though former 'Til Tuesday drummer Michael Hausmann appears on a handful of tracks it was decided early on in recording that this would definitely be credited as an Aimee Mann solo record.

"It was during the initial recordings of Whatever that we decided the situation was just too awkward to continue using the name" she explains. "At the time there was just myself and Michael, who didn't contribute much musically apart from drumming and I was doing most of the planning for the record with Jon who was playing a lot, producing and who happened to be my boyfriend at the time. He introduced me to a lot of great '60's Pop music that I hadn't really been aware of before, so we listened to lots of stuff.

"The kind of record we knew we wanted to make necessitated a very different kind of playing than I'd been used to before. In 'Til Tuesday we'd always used drum machines and it was a very controlled kind of playing but for this record I knew we needed a looser kind of feel which was rather alien to Michael with the result that he wasn't playing at his best so after a point we realised we couldn't include Michael in an unqualified way and it was then that it began to look much more like a solo record. If you've really only two members in a band and one of them begins to fade out of the picture then it's really best to call it something else."

Whatever is a thrilling and challenging album. Not 'challenging' in a Fall/Rollerskate Skinny/I-challenge-you-to-give-me-one-good-reason-to-listen-to-this-muck sort of way, rather it prompts you to crank your cranium into action as you unravel the sub-plots and oblique but never obscure strategies of Aimee's songs. 'Stupid Thing' ("The progression from pure sadness to regret, anger and irritation."), 'I Know There's A Word' and 'I Could Hurt You Now' are on the face of it well-crafted, tuneful songs but those skilful structures conceal Machiavellian emotional coups and lyrical spins where the tale is twisted as regularly as the knife.

Even a song as ostensibly straightforward as 'Could've Been Anyone', a Byrdsian romp which actually features Roger McGuinn ("Roger has such a sweet, innocent aspect to him. Maybe it's drug damage, I dunno!") quoting moments from his glorious past during a series of guitar fills, turns from an 'Ah well, it's over now but I suppose we can still be friends' story into something rather nastier with the lines "Don't worry, you can learn to live without/You've got a lifetime of that to draw upon/And anyway . . . it could've been anyone" . . . real life ahoy!

And then there's '4th Of July', a song which her occasional collaborator and friend Elvis Costello describes as "containing the best four lines I've heard in many years" before going on to pronounce Whatever as "enough to make strong women weep and men songwriters blush with envy." Over a melancholy acoustic intro the lines in question are "Today's the 4th of July/Another June has gone by/And when they light up our town I just think/What a waste of gunpowder and sky." Pretty impressive I'm sure you'll agree, but what really makes the song is the full-blooded chorus when you realise that this is not just another pretty word-picture from smalltown America, but a brilliantly disguised two-fingered farewell to an ex-partner. And when Aimee's perfect Pop voice - she would have made an ideal vocal foil for Phil Spector - hits the lines "Oh baby, I wonder if when you are older - someday/You'll wake up and say 'My God, I should have told her - what would it take?/But now here I am and the world's gotten colder/And she's got the river down which I sold her' " it completely reaffirms the fact that you're in the presence of a major, major talent. And what of Elvis Costello, the co-author of 'The Other End Of The Telescope' and distributor of such fulsome praise?

"I was very flattered when he said that about '4th Of July'," she says modestly. "I first got in touch with him when I sent him a tape of music that for some reason I couldn't come up with words to. I'd been really slogging away for months and was virtually at the stage where I was just going to pick a topic - and I hate doing that, it's always very risky because I feel that music and lyrics should blend together from the moment you start a song - so I sent it to him and, of course, he wrote the lyric to 'Telescope' during a plane flight! His words were very inspiring and in that song he managed to capture what was going on in my life at the time . . . it was uncanny."

It would appear that Mr.C has a knack for peering into the souls of female artists, when you consider his knocked-out-in-a-weekend collection of songs for Wendy James' album Now Ain't The Time For Your Tears, a set of song which she herself proclaimed to be bizarrely accurate reflections of her personal situation.

"He told me about that," she says. "He didn't really know too much about her but sort of extrapolated on what he did know. He was actually quite surprised that she agreed to record those songs because the story being told isn't exactly flattering. I think those are some of his best lyrics but she didn't really do a great job on them. Her voice could be perfectly charming if she didn't try so hard to . . . emote. The emoting clashed with the songs she was singing. There's a thing that singers do when they emote which sounds really fake and I feel that if you want to create an emotional response with a song then you should get out of the way to an extent and let the words do it for you. That's assuming you have words which mean something, And most people don't."

As you'll have no doubt gathered by now, Aimee Mann is razor sharp when it comes to her lyrics, and yet even she feels the need to be constantly on her guard lest she slip into words-by-numbers.

"I try to be aware of rhymes that have been used to death and turns of phrase that were worn out twenty years ago. The Dictionary Of Rock Cliché is, however, alive and well. I feel that after something has been heard once it's forbidden. For instance 'cuts like a knife', 'phone/alone', 'waiting/anticipating' and I'm really not interested at all in hearing about 'two hearts beating as one' anymore! Then there's always the old reliable 'I'm on fire/Burning with desire' . . . don't use it, kids! Forget the MENSA test, your IQ must be below 60 if you use those rhymes!"

One of my favourite songs on Whatever is 'Mr/ Harris', a string and woodwind-laden track which recounts in almost cinematic fashion the story of a love affair between a young woman and a much older man who 'looks like Jimmy Stewart in his younger days'. The detail is so precise and the delivery so convincing that I couldn't help but wonder if it's autobiographical.

"No, not at all," comes the immediate reply. "Although I do have a big crush on Jimmy Stewart, he's 80 years old but I'll take him anyway! The real part of that story is that you've found somebody you're completely in love with and you're willing to overcome whatever differences and knowing that even if you have a short amount of time together it's worth it because it's a real experience, that it's better than a lifetime in a relationship where no real communication takes place, where everybody is covering their tracks."

The song has a beautifully realistic edge too, the narrator acknowledging the inevitability of her partner's demise, as Aimee explains.

"When Bob Clearmountain was mixing the record he always used to wipe his eyes when that line came around. He actually cried . . . I made Bob Clearmountain cry! He really seemed to understand that third verse (sings, sings!) "Of course I know that/We've only got ten years or twenty left/But to be honest/I'm happy with whatever time we get/Depending on whichever book you read/Sometimes it takes a lifetime to get what you need", I think that really killed him. Probably because he's starting to think about those things himself and trying to make those decisions about his own life. That's why Bob's such a great mixer, he listens to the songs rather than just looking at the LEDs."

So is the Aimee Mann who made Whatever a happier Aimee Mann than the one who bared her soul on Everything's Different Now?

"Oh my God, about a zillion times happier!" she chirps. "I'm the happiest I've ever been by far. I feel I got to the bottom of what was making me so unhappy for years and I realised that I couldn't just go on repeating the same mistakes over and over. Y'know, like getting myself involved in really stupid relationships where everybody's unhappy and it's absurd. This is the first time I'm not involved in any relationship and I realise that this has been one of my problems. It suddenly occurred to me that since I was 18 I'd been living with guys, breaking up, moving in with someone else. There's been like five guys that I've lived with for years at a stretch and I've always had a relationship and just jumped from one thing to another and this is the first time I haven't had any and it's a great feeling. I used to be frightened about being like this but I feel completely free of . . . fear.

"I always had my safety nets set up," continues Aimee. "Y'know, before I finished one relationship I'd already be involved in the intrigues of setting the next one up, which is very unhealthy but that was my own personal thing and was done completely out of fear. And now it's totally exhilarating to do the double back-somersault with no net and know you can do it!"

What about the hoary old cliché that the best art requires pain and that happy people make shite records?

"I think stoned people make really shite records!" she laughs. "One aspect of my personality is that I find myself really easily drawn into other people's sadness. There are always problems and dilemmas to sort out and I can relate to what other people are having to deal with as easily as what I'm going through. But sadness is different from depression and that's what I'm trying to leave behind. I don't think depression is healthy and it's actually very hard to be creative when you're in that state, because you just lie around and can't do anything because to do anything would be painful. To look at words on a page and try to decipher them is just too much effort because you're overwhelmed. Sadness is different. Sadness will always be with everyone.

"That's alright, there are things in the world that deserve the dignity of grief because there are terrible things in the world and the should be allotted a certain amount of grief and sadness because that's only right and proper."