Mann alive

When it comes to the record business, Aimee Mann has been dumped on more times than a prostrate James Joyce bestraddled by Nora Barnacle. Hunter S. Thompson’s famous line about the music industry being a shallow money trench where good men die like dogs could have been composed in her honour.

But some American lives do have second acts.

After ten years of seeing great records go down the toilet (most notably Til Tuesday’s second and third opuses, plus her own solo gems Whatever and I’m With Stupid), Mann finally bid adieu to corporate rock and bought back the rights to her Bachelor No. 2 album from Geffen. Sick to the back teeth of being owned by morons who wanted her to co-write with the likes of Diane Warren in the hopes of snagging a radio hit, she started financing her own recordings and licensing them out to interested parties. It was the best move she ever made.

“The failing of the music industry is that because the executives themselves aren’t really music fans, they don’t know how to respond like music fans,” she says. “Record companies get hold of an idea that works – or has worked once – and that’s their lucky charm. In the absence of any real connection with music, all they can do is rely on talismans. Y’know, I think most music fans, while they might enjoy Britney Spears, are probably going to get tired of that at some point and want something totally different, it could be groups like The Strokes or The Hives. But by that time the record companies will have missed the boat. They’ll get it on the tail end when people are already starting to get sick of that. It’s very short-term thinking. If you’re a guy who really loves music and wants to change things, you’ll get eaten alive in that system. It’s rotten from the head down and it corrupts everybody who comes in contact with it.”

So how does Mann keep her head above such shark-infested waters? Well, it helps when you have fans like filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, who wrote Magnolia around a handful of her songs. The resulting soundtrack album eventually garnered her a string of Grammy, Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Irony of ironies: she found salvation in the one industry with more idiots per square yard than rock ‘n’ roll. And Mann is of course married to songwriter Michael Penn, brother of actors Sean and Chris. But as Mann indicates, the in-laws don’t necessarily guarantee her an easier passage in Hollywood circles.

“For one thing Sean doesn’t even live in Los Angeles,” she points out, “he lives in northern California so we don’t really see them. And also Michael is very different from his brothers, I don’t think they really have a lot in common.”

The singer is currently at the fixing and mixing stage of her fourth solo album, entitled Lost In Space. She’s in a strange position – post-Magnolia, she might actually be considered a commercial commodity for the first time since Til Tuesday’s Voices Carry.

“You never know,” she laughs, “maybe people are sick of me by now. Any time you’re doing anything that you hope to make a living from, you’re a bit of a commodity. But at least I’m my own commodity. If I want to sell my services, at least somebody else doesn’t make the money, it goes to me!”