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Only connect
Aimee Mann reaches out on The Forgotten Arm
BY ELIOT WILDER
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Related Links
Aimee Mann's official Web site
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Aimee Mann’s voice, though limited, has always been able to wring the maximum emotion out of a lyric with a seeming minimum effort. It’s not so much what she sings as how she sings it. So her songs, invariably about relationships in trouble, affect listeners in ways that vocalists possessed of greater range and dexterity — your average multi-octave American Idol, say — often don’t. She wraps herself around a phrase like a thread tightly wound around a finger, squeezing new meaning out of even simple single-syllable rhymes like "road"/"load." But with Mann, to paraphrase the Stones, it’s not only the singer, it’s the song. Her literate lyrics rival peak-period Elvis Costello, minus the puns and the overt cleverness. And her melodies tap into the vein once mined by Squeeze and XTC — back when they mattered. Her catalogue is fat with unforgettable hooks and vivid images; think of "4th of July," from her benchmark 1993 album Whatever (Imago), with its "Today’s the Fourth of July/Another June has gone by/And when they light up our town I just think/What a waste of gunpowder and sky." All this hasn’t gone unnoticed: she’s received critical accolades, and she even got an Academy Award nomination for "Save Me," from the Magnolia soundtrack. Yet her commercial success, at least since her "Voices Carry" ’Til Tuesday days, has been modest. That’s the price an artist pays when easy-on-the-ear melodies are not all that emotionally easy to get through. Her well-documented run-ins with record labels led to the creation of her own SuperEgo imprint. Her new The Forgotten Arm chronicles a relationship between a drug addict named Caroline and a Vietnam vet named John who meet, fall in love, and then fall apart while traveling across the lonely byways of 1970s America. It’s not the headiest of concepts, but it does allow her to get under the skin of dispossessed folks whose lives are anything but a dream come true. On the gnarly "Goodbye Caroline," our heroine is told, "Put on your shoes, girl/I’m goin’ to the Coast/Where every loser/Gives up what hurts the most." The following track, "Going Through the Motions," has Caroline responding, "Feel like I’m in jail/With you and Mr. Hyde/A guy who leaves a trail/About a mile wide." These are desperate characters going down a dangerous path, giving up one addiction for another, and yet their dark and ugly dealings are set against some of Mann’s most upbeat music. She’s said that she was going after a bright and loose ’70s vibe, and that’s what she and producer Joe Henry achieve. Punchy drums, thrumming bass lines, and grinding guitars give this disc a loose liveliness quite different from the clean, tight arrangements of earlier albums. Perhaps that’s because Mann and Henry knocked the album out in just five days and with few overdubs. A West Coast ambiance keeps the overall mood from seeming too dark, much the way Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors and Randy Newman’s Little Criminals benefitted from sunlit production touches. But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find harsh realities. On the closing "Beautiful," an anguished Mann trills, "Why does it hurt me/To feel so much tenderness?" Often, we learn from The Forgotten Arm, making human connections is the hardest part of life. Aimee Mann performs on Thursday June 9 at the Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Place in Boston; call (617) 931-2000.
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