Aimee Mann/Photo: Aimee Mann
It was January 16, 2000, and the wife and I decided to take in an afternoon matinee of a film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, one of her favorite directors at the time. He may still be, for all I know. “Magnolia” had opened in December 1999 to critical acclaim and good box office numbers, but with a baby on the way, we didn’t have the scratch to pay full price, hence the choice of a discounted matinee showing. The film opens with Aimee Mann’s cover of “One” written by Harry Nilsson and made famous by Three Dog Night (from their eponymous debut in 1968). But her work is not just something played as the opening credits roll—as the movie unfolds, it becomes clear that Mann’s music is integral to the movie, to the extent that all of the film’s main characters actually sing her song “Wise Up” during one scene.
Oddly enough, that pivotal moment’s song had actually been written for 1996’s “Jerry Maguire,” but wasn’t used in the movie. Mann had songs on previous movie soundtracks, but had not collaborated so directly with any filmmaker. She met Paul Thomas Anderson when her husband Michael Penn (brother of actors Sean and Chris) wrote songs and the score to his 1996 film “Hard Eight.” Inspired by seeing her frequent appearances at the Los Angeles club Largo, Anderson says in the liner notes to the soundtrack album that when he wrote the script to “Magnolia,” he “sat down to write an adaptation of Aimee Mann songs.” The connection is so tight that Anderson told the Toronto Star when the film came out that “Simon & Garfunkel is to ‘The Graduate’ as Aimee Mann is to ‘Magnolia.'”
It’s now been just over twenty-four years since I’ve viewed the movie in its entirety, but I do remember how it was an overall success, the importance of Mann’s music to the film (she has nine songs on the soundtrack album), and at over three hours, “Magnolia”’s impressive length. The other thing I recall, as the film’s complicated plot unfolded, was being a tad distracted as my wife became increasingly uncomfortable, shifting in her theater seat and at some points doubling over in pain. Our baby was due in a few weeks, most likely, and we had visited the hospital in the previous week, only to be told that she was experiencing Braxton Hicks contractions and sent home. Now on this particular afternoon, neither of us wanted to leave the movie early, as we wanted to get our money’s worth. But as our purchased three-plus hours neared the end, and the credits rolled as Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” (which received multiple accolades, including nominations for a Grammy, Golden Globe and an Academy Award) played, she said we needed to go to the hospital. She was pretty sure she was in labor.
Our only child was born that night, perhaps only three to four hours later. Now twenty-four years, a divorce, his grandfather’s death (at the age of sixty-four), a college graduation (including a BFA in film and television, concentration in editing) later, I’m not sure how the movie stands up (the film was a little controversial, which is saying something, coming from the man who directed “Boogie Nights”), but Mann’s songs are still beautiful in their understated way. Her unaffected yet effective alto and her intricate stories converted to song are still moving, although I suppose my personal experience viewing the film can’t help but color my opinion.
Mann may be best remembered by me for her contribution to “Magnolia,” but she’s done way more than that. After suffering a tumultuous childhood in Virginia (including her mother kidnapping her and taking her to Europe), which she believes gave her PTSD, and may have led to her other struggles with mental and physical illness, when she turned eighteen, she moved to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music. She dropped out after a year and a half to join local punk band Young Snakes, and following that, Ministry. Yes, that Ministry. Founder and sole continuous member Al Jourgensen claims to have had a “brief romantic relationship” with Mann. She wrote the song “No More Crying” about him, she told Colorado’s Gazette Telegraph in 1985.
She formed ‘Til Tuesday and had a hit with the single “Voices Carry,” (Jourgensen claims this song was also inspired by their “very dysfunctional relationship,” as he told Rolling Stone in 2013). The song hit number eight on the Billboard 100 and the video garnered frequent plays on MTV. The band won the Best New Artist award at the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards (beating out Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Julian Lennon, Sade and Sheila E., which provides an idea of what the popular music environment was like at that time). After three records (including the excellent but commercially ignored “Everything’s Different Now” in 1988), the band broke up in 1990 and Aimee Mann went solo.
All of her solo albums since then have been uniformly solid and catchy exercises in what today would be called the “singer-songwriter” subgenre. Her solo output is characterized by intelligent lyrics and plentiful (but never inappropriate) pop hooks. Mann’s first two solo records (in 1993 and 1995) each sold over 100,000 copies, but she would eventually more than double that sales number with the first record she released via her independent label SuperEgo. Major-label Geffen thought the record would not have commercial success, so they refused to release it. Mann was able to use the money she had earned from “Magnolia” to buy back the master recordings from the label, and they released her from her contract. “Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo” complete with a subtitle ironically referencing her position as a songwriter facing extinction, was eventually released in May 2000, and was a commercial and critical success. The album did feature some songs that had appeared on the “Magnolia” soundtrack. After releasing a solo album every two to three years or so, after a five-year break, her 2017 solo record also came with an ironic and self-referential title: “Mental Illness.”
Mann started writing her most recent solo album, “Queens of the Summer Hotel” in 2018 after being asked by film producers Barbara Broccoli and Fred Zollo to write songs for a musical of “Girl, Interrupted,” the 1993 memoir about institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital (the movie adaptation, starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie came out in 1999). While the musical idea got derailed by the pandemic, she was so inspired by reading the memoir that it was almost as if she couldn’t help but write songs suggested by the book. She told The Guardian that after reading “Girl, Interrupted,” she “started immediately having ideas for scenes” and “I was off and running before there was a script. It’s so obviously in my wheelhouse and I’d written about this stuff before.” Born in 1960, Aimee Mann was only seven when the author, then eighteen, was institutionalized, but it’s easy to understand how she can still relate to the subject matter, given her history of dealing with mental illness and addressing those experiences in her music.
Mann will turn sixty-four this fall, my dad’s age when he passed away in 2007, but that and The Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” are probably the only connections between them. But connections are links that we make in our minds, and sometimes our minds play tricks on us. Aimee Mann’s voice, writing and characteristic bleach-blonde hair have not faded over time. She’s one of those people who now seems they must have been born an adult, and never seems to age. Perhaps she’s matured, like a fine wine, but here’s hoping that time will continue to keep her talent as fresh as it was in 1985. If you have tickets to see her at her sold-out show at Cahn Auditorium on the campus of Northwestern, on Saturday, March 2, I’ll have to express my feelings of jealousness and envy, and hope that you’ll take me along, if not in body, then at least in spirit. Just as Mann lays her feelings bare in song, I’m hoping to do better at recognizing and sharing my feelings. But that’s just fodder for my therapist—if you go, enjoy!
Aimee Mann will play a sold-out show at Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson Street, Evanston, on the campus of Northwestern University, on Saturday, March 2. Doors at 7pm, show at 8pm.
