The Bard of Self-Awareness

Since her mid-'80s MTV breakthrough fronting the band 'Til Tuesday and through her nine solo albums, Aimee Mann has explored the universal pain of trying to connect with other people and the still-more-angst-ridden struggle of trying to know ourselves. With hit songs pivoting on lines like, "Save me from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they could never love anyone," her work has never been for the blissfully self-deluded but for those prepared to face their deepest truths while enjoying complex melodies. It's also among the wittiest in pop. When a friend asked her about the new album she was writing, Mann described it as, "Oh, you know, my usual songs about mental illness." The name stuck: Mental Illness was released this spring.

Would it be fair to say that self-awareness is key for many of your songs' characters?

It's hard to be self-aware. It's certainly hard to deal with somebody who doesn't care about self-awareness or doesn't have it or isn't working toward it—it's kind of impossible. I don't know how people go on without constantly working and questioning themselves and thinking, What am I doing? What sort of character flaws am I bringing to this equation? Life is hard enough when you're doing that. I don't know how people get by when they're not doing that.

In one new song, a woman tells her partner that they're in a rut and that "we've become our worst mistakes."

In that song, "Simple Fix," I had these chords that had a menacing, repetitious quality that reminded me of those relationships where you're really attached to somebody, balanced with them in this codependent way, but you're always sniping at each other: a hostile dependency. So I think the simple fix is that you've got to leave. There's no fixing it, there's no making it better, you just gotta step out of the circle.

Do you hope that the characters in your songs will somehow figure it out?

I always hope that for anyone I know or anyone I write about. Most of my songs are eventually fictional, even if they're inspired by somebody I know, but you always hope that they will figure it out, that something will happen that will push them in a different direction. I believe people can change. I think it helps if you want to change, and it certainly helps if you think you need to change.

But it doesn't always happen.

I know people who desperately want to change, and then you say to them, "Well, maybe you can try this," and they'll say, "No, that won't work!" and then that gets repeated—10 different suggestions, 10 reasons why it won't work. You never know what's going to do the trick for them. Maybe they just have to hear it from someone else.

Sometimes people try to rescue a relationship with a big, Hollywood-style romantic gesture. In a new song, you specifically discourage that.

That was extrapolated from a situation in which somebody I knew had been indicted for fraud and couldn't understand why his girlfriend wanted to break up. It's distorted thinking: He thought, Well, what about all the times when I didn't do something bad? If that's what somebody's thinking, it's hard to explain a different kind of thinking to them. I mean, they obviously just have an extra chip, or a different chip. He couldn't understand why his girlfriend's whole picture of him completely changed. I parlayed bits of that into a story about a guy who keeps showing up at his girlfriend's house and a friend drives up and says, "Dude, just get in the car. This is not gonna happen."

Your best songs demand emotional honesty, even if it's painful. As you work on ideas, how do you decide which ones ring true to you?

There always has to be an emotional element that makes sense to me. But a lot of it comes down to the music. I can have ideas about things I want to write about—a relationship I'm in with someone or a friend who's in a situation he can't get out of. I can have things happening right in front of me that I want to write about. But as soon as I start playing the music and singing, the music dictates where it goes. Not to get all mystical, but when I'm playing I do say: "There's an emotional tone here. What story goes with this tone?"

One new song was partly inspired by people training for a one-way mission to Mars, but you focus on those who'd be left behind.

It's about that feeling of looking back on moments when you think, Why didn't I say something? There's almost a feeling that if you keep thinking about it, you're going to be able to go back to the past and change it. Like this idea of the mission to Mars: Suppose you were the person left behind and most of you wants to say, "Don't go! What are you talking about? You know it's suicide." It's certainly abandonment for the people you leave behind. But you're also wondering, What was this dynamic between us that nobody could ever say anything, nobody could ever say how they really feel, and then because of that, it's over?

Somebody needs to speak up.

A lot of people don't want to be the one who is rejected, or they're just afraid something bad is going to happen. So a relationship can just die because nobody said, "I need this" or "Can we try a different thing?"

And then we're left with regret.

It's bewildering when you find yourself asking, Why am I playing along with this? It's crazy, and it happens to me plenty, on a smaller scale—this dynamic of just talking with somebody and finding yourself agreeing with some crazy-ass bullshit that you don't agree with at all. And you think, Why didn't I just say I don't agree with that? It's because you don't want to fight, you don't want trouble. I don't know why I do it, but it still happens.

Many of your songs focus on what we need from each other and how we need to understand each other. Why is that so hard?

I think people tend to project their own history and perspective on other people or maneuver relationships into dynamics where they can play the same roles they have before. I think that happens more than it doesn't, but even when you're aware of it, it's really difficult. When you have a tendency to constantly see situations from the perspective of feeling left out, it's easy to interpret almost any situation to fit that grid, and that makes relationships really hard.

You've joked about people saying your songs can be downers, which is what led to the title of your new album.

Yeah, but to me observation and analysis and description are uplifting. I feel energized while I'm working on a song, or when I finish a song, and I feel energized when I'm singing it. I don't care if it's sad—those are the songs I like.

So you don't aspire to make more cheerful records?

I think most happy songs are dumb. I don't really have an envy of happy songs or cheerful songs or up-tempo songs, because I like to have a harmonic complexity that matches an intellectual complexity in the lyrics. I like lyrics to be well written. I like language, I like exact rhymes, I like internal rhymes, I like the manipulation of language and choosing the perfect word. It's why I like comedians so much: They're all about the distillation of language and using the perfect word at the perfect time. That's really fascinating—that's exciting to me. The tempo or whether there are major chords? Those are not big factors.