What s My Age Again Cover Art
I n Los Angeles, it'southward early and overcast. "Information technology has that 6-in-the-forenoon feel," says Aimee Mann, eternally droll, from a home role wallpapered in fruity foliage. "So it'southward been difficult to go going." Drab weather condition demands skilful knitwear, and Mann has paired thick-rimmed round glasses the size of ashtrays with a brown woollen sweater vest. She admits, with a whaddaya-gonna-do shrug, that she bought the Alexa Chung garm off Instagram. "I've actually bought several things from Instagram ads," she says sheepishly. "How do they know?"
When it comes to her career, the 61-year-old songwriter has never been i for the hard sell. In 1985, Mann's band 'Til Tuesday had a US Meridian 10 hit with their debut unmarried, Voices Carry, a sublime new-wave canticle about the liability of expressing emotion. With her shocked peroxide do, rat-tail plait and unyielding stare, Isle of mann resisted sexual and commercial commodification. Misunderstood past their label, the group concluded, then Mann spent the 90s with her starting time three solo albums of brilliantly spiky, weary, erudite guitar pop mired in major-label politics, from collapses and buyouts to brazen aloofness at what to do with a late thirtysomething classicist more akin to Randy Newman than Britney Spears.
By the millennium, Mann had quit to starting time her own label, SuperEgo, where she has remained, releasing wryly tragic character studies of people doomed to self-demolition. "As I've gone on, it's more interesting to see how my past experience tin can inform a vocal, only it'southward not necessarily about me," says Mann. She isn't at all chary in person, but funny and sharp as she reflects for 2 hours, until her tummy rumbles for breakfast.
A few years ago, the film producers Barbara Broccoli and Fred Zollo approached Isle of mann about writing the songs for a musical of Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen'south 1993 memoir about her institutionalisation in McLean psychiatric hospital, in Massachusetts, in the tardily 60s. Mann read it and "started immediately having ideas for scenes", she says. "I was off and running earlier there was a script. It'southward and so obviously in my wheelhouse and I'd written most this stuff before." Mann'southward last album, released in 2017, was called Mental Illness, a joke at her bleak reputation – one largely imposed on her by men perplexed by this drily funny adult female with no gustation for sugarcoating. ("I've never understood this ice queen affair myself," wrote the critic Robert Christgau in 2002. "What'due south the big thrill – getting to see them seize with teeth their lip when they come?")
When the pandemic stalled the play, Mann turned the songs into her new record, Queens of the Summer Hotel. Mann tells Kaysen'due south 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 result. In a way, it is as well Isle of man's story, based on a lifetime's experience of the tight constrictions of femininity.
In 2002, she checked into the Sierra Tucson rehab centre with PTSD, severe dissociation, feet and depression. She hasn't previously talked virtually it publicly. "I just haven't had the distance," she says. Back then, Mann was ostensibly riding a moment of career vindication later all the major-label strife. Paul Thomas Anderson had based his acclaimed 1999 film Magnolia on her songs. I was nominated for an Oscar. (She lost to Phil Collins.) But she was stressed by the pressure to capitalise on the opportunity, including touring heavily. "I started non to be able to function," she says. That yr, a boozer driver hit her tour omnibus, which flipped 3 times. She however played that nighttime'south show. Although she wasn't hurt, "I was really in shock for a long time, and I had a lot of intrusive thoughts about the car going over the embankment".
At first she resisted the idea of rehab. "I was a adequately insular person – as much as I'm telling a perfect stranger nearly my time in the nuthouse," she says drily. "I didn't want to exist around other people – which is a symptom in itself, when containment becomes the most important thing." But she eased in. "They too had eating-disorder patients and addicts and alcoholics and sex addicts. It was very interesting to talk to those people and see what you had in mutual. A lot of them came from trauma as well. It'due south just a variation in how you express it."
Her 2002 album, Lost in Space, detailed this period, but but obliquely. "It'due south kinda getting harder to breathe," she sang on Pavlov'south Bell. "I won't allow it evidence / I'g all near deprival / But can't deprival permit me believe?" Mann had watched in the 90s as the post-Girl, Interrupted generation – Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple – had their unfettered accounts of mental ill-health mocked by the media. "I saw that and idea, no way am I telling people what is happening with me," she says.
She had already learned to conceal her feelings as a daughter of the 60s, when it was "understood that women were stupid", she says, amused all the same vociferous at the horror of it all. "The conventional wisdom was that women talked all the time, that they were bad drivers; that if they were unhappy in their marriage, information technology was considering they didn't take literally what nature had destined them for. And so you tin't make a fucking mistake, because the error is going to be immediately attributed to your gender. They create a box and so put you in the box and so that the box tin command you lot. I recall whatever woman my age is traumatised by growing upwards in the 60s and 70s because it was so relentless."
Even by those standards, Mann'south girlhood was extreme – the source, she thinks, of her PTSD. She was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1960. When she was three, her mother got significant by a guy who worked for her father, and they kidnapped Isle of mann and ran off to Europe. (Hence her anxiety nearly travelling.) Her father hired a private detective, who brought her home a twelvemonth later on to a new stepmother and two stepbrothers. Her new family members mocked her for wanting to play sports and musical instruments – in the 60s south, this was unladylike and might deter potential husbands.
"The reasoning was so round," she recalls. "You would say: 'Well, why tin't I practice that?' 'Because y'all're a girl.' I would literally experience fucking crazy. Yous cannot reveal yourself." Stoicism became all she had. "I remember being eight years old and being really proud that I was able to control my face so information technology wouldn't make a fucking expression. In my family, if you looked unhappy or distressing, the stepmother would say you were sulking. I mean, my fucking mother left when I was three years onetime – maybe I would take been sad! But if yous looked happy, somebody would be like, this is a affair I can use confronting you."
She apologises for sounding bitter, although she doesn't at all. Her female parent died of lung cancer in 2018. They didn't see each other often, until the end, when Mann forgave her. "I told her, I get why this happened – that guy had a combination of charm and neediness that was probably very compelling. And once she'southward significant, what are you going to do? She'south trapped on every side." That sort of mercurial figure recurs throughout Mann'due south catalogue, notably on 2012'southward rocky Charmer, in which she delved into the narcissistic psyche and its unsettling appeal. "I personally never found him charming, even at three, because I knew he was hateful," says Mann. "He would do a game where he would pinch y'all really difficult – and that's not a game, right? – and go: 'What, that hurts?' And then he would exercise it again."
Isle of mann looks 20 years younger than she is, so it'southward easy to forget that she was 16 when punk hit – the perfect age for David Bowie and Iggy Pop to inspire a repressed suburban girl to dye her hair pulp colours. "It was a revelation," she says. "I played three chords on the acoustic guitar. I wasn't really a musician. But the punk and new wave scene was so interesting, so inventive – literally do any you lot want. That Patti Smith was out there and people were accepting her? Oh my God, in that location's a way out."
She left Virginia for music schoolhouse in Boston, so quit to join bands. What gave her the gumption to go? "Part of it is that I knew I was really unequipped to exist able to do annihilation else," she says. "You lot know yous don't really fit in the normal world." After stints in atonal punk band Immature Snakes, and industrial metal group Ministry, Isle of man formed 'Til Tuesday and asserted, even in their primeval local press clippings, that they were going to make it.
She's always been a good gauge of her own songwriting, she says ("information technology's not every bit bad as what'southward on the radio and that'due south got to count for something") and craved success because "there wasn't a adult female making the kind of music that I wanted to hear". Joni Mitchell once praised the detailed range of emotions and anxieties that Mann expressed in her music. However, she had no desire for stardom. "The attending I got in my family was negative attending. I equated that to: if somebody looks at you, it'south not good because you're going to exist criticised or yelled at or made fun of. I wanted to play music, but I didn't like the thought of being in an airdrome and people looking at me. It's that animal instinct – when another fauna is staring at yous, you physically experience information technology as a threat."
But her greatest problem was the music industry defaulting on punk's promise of freedom. In the 80s, the label worked 'Til Tuesday to expiry. "Their attitude towards artists is they take a stable of horses and they desire to hitch a couple up to a wagon," says Isle of man. "And if i of them dies on the task, you just put another equus caballus in at that place. They don't intendance." Being on the route with 'Til Tuesday was so intense that she once contemplated cutting her paw – plenty to wound, not maim – to enforce a suspension. In the mid-90s, Isle of man, at present solo – and repeatedly battling label execs who said they "didn't hear a single" on her albums – found herself on Geffen, also home to Nirvana. "I remember having a conversation with someone at Geffen [who was] very shocked that Kurt Cobain had killed himself. They had a minute where they were like, perhaps we should consider the mental health of artists on the road considering information technology'due south very unnatural."
It took her years to push button back. "If your main survival technique was to exist a people-pleaser, information technology's really hard to non do that. Women especially have their careers controlled by this threat that you volition be perceived equally difficult." One new song, Y'all Don't Have the Room, speaks to the nonexistent margin for error that women face. It fits the Daughter, Interrupted story as much every bit it does Britney Spears, who has said she is afraid she will be judged harshly in one case her conservatorship ends. "It's a fucking crime," Isle of mann says of Spears' situation. "Talk about the prize horse being hitched up to the car and not letting that gravy railroad train stop."
Isle of man quit the major system every bit soon every bit she could, buying back the rights to her then-unreleased 2000 album, Available No 2 or, the Terminal Remains of the Dodo (its title a comment on the plight of the songwriter). "I was ill of asking for permission to make the music I wanted to make," she says, "which I never felt was so crazy or left of center. I'thou non John Cage."
The pressures abated somewhat; Mann moved to Los Angeles and in 1997 married Michael Penn (blood brother of actor Sean). They joined the songwriting community around local club Largo, and fell in with likeminded comedians. It says something most the open-mindedness of comedy that it took Isle of mann's appearances on the sketch shows Portlandia and Tim and Eric Awesome Bear witness, Great Job! to expose her to younger listeners. (In 2018, pop star Heaven Ferreira, who has also battled the major label system, released a fantastic embrace of Voices Bear.)
Echoing the potential that Patti Smith showed her equally a teenager, Mann is now part of the limited vanguard of older women in music who survived manufacture hostility to create into their 60s and beyond, from Kim Gordon to Marianne Faithfull. Information technology's challenging to age in a concern that is "100% obsessed with the way people look, and now more than ever," says Isle of mann. "In the 60s, you had a lot of singers who were not that bonny, but they could sing and that was the point." After being held to narrow standards of femininity, turning 50 "and I'k supposed to go, oh, who cares what I await like?" she says. "That's a hard mental exercise."
You would call the by decade Mann'south prime if that didn't elide her consistency. Just last year most stalled her headway. While mastering Queens of the Summer Hotel, she idea her computer speakers were broken and called Penn in to check. He said they sounded fine. Mann's hearing had become distorted thanks to a nervous system disorder. She developed vestibular migraines and became ill and featherbrained. Aggress by tinnitus, she couldn't listen to music for a yr. "All my sensory input was distorted and overloaded – light from a telephone or a computer fabricated me ill, and I felt like I had a terrible hangover or concussion all the time."
She figured at that place had to exist a connexion with her PTSD – or maybe from a childhood concussion sustained when her mother's boyfriend crashed the machine. She saw seven neurologists. 1 prescribed medication that fabricated Isle of mann psychotic, driving her to suicidal ideation. And then one asked whether she had a history of trauma – survivors showed a college incidence of migraines. He told her to go on going to therapy and processing her past.
"And and then I got an ad on Instagram for an app – and I cannot believe that this is the story," she says with comic disbelief.
This chronic pain management app, based on cerebral behavioural therapy, confirmed what the doc said – that babyhood trauma "with additional stress – like, I don't know, perhaps being isolated in a pandemic! – makes your system actually reactive. And when your nervous organisation is reactive, it starts sending out pain signals because information technology feels mistakenly like information technology's in danger. I was similar, that's fucking it!"
She laughs. "Between the vest and the app on Instagram, I'grand similar, all right, maybe there'south ane% proficient in the sea of evil."
Isle of mann had idea she might never work again. "Music was so unpleasant, and at that place was no solace in it," she says. The prospect was particularly bleak given that she had only recently learned to truly love performing. When her health improved, she attempted live rehearsals, hoping to make information technology through five songs as a beginning. "Information technology was and then magical to play with these other people that it literally started to heal and calm my nervous system," she says. "I realised that not seeing other people [in lockdown] was so stressful for me. People underestimate that we're pack animals."
Mann still has some hearing distortion, meaning no guitar-heavy records for now. While she was unwell, she started work on a graphic memoir – she's a huge comics fan (she has a song named Ghost Earth and the cartoonist Seth drew the artwork for Lost in Space) and the format reminded her of songwriting. "The artwork gives y'all a feeling that'southward a little like the feeling music gives you," she says. "And the dialogue has to be very specific."
It'southward hard for her to see the overarching narrative of her story. Whereas she's a proficient judge of her own songwriting, "information technology'south pretty hard to be objective about an unabridged life", she says. "What to leave out, what to continue in." Not to mention the time it takes to heal. "I was stubborn?" she suggests. "And I kept moving forrad regardless of obstacles. Maybe that'southward it."
Queens of the Summer Hotel is out at present on SuperEgo Records
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/nov/04/aimee-mann-any-woman-my-age-is-traumatised-by-growing-up-in-the-60s-and-70s
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