Photo credit: Sheryl Nields

I got to interview Aimee Mann recently which was very cool.  I published part of this interview on The Huffington Post and scooped up some bits for my site.  I always feel like a bit of a stalker as I comb the internet doing research on my victims.  With Aimee I discovered that I can trace my life from senior year of high school through today with her career.

John Norton broke up with me senior year to go back to his girlfriend, Gwyn.  I poured my heartbreak into the song “Voices Carry” by Aimee when she was with Til Tuesday as I drove around back roads in South Jersey trying to escape my misery.

I had forgotten that Aimee plays the Nihilist girlfriend who cuts off her toe in The Big Lebowski, but that movie is on my all-time top ten list of greats.

We’ve moved around a lot in LA.  My favorite kitchen was on Hayes Drive in Carthay Circle.  I can remember singing along with the girls to the Beatles cover, “Two of Us” that Aimee did with her husband Michael Penn.  (Love this song.  One of the few Beatles’ covers that stands up.)

In prepping for the interview, I discovered the song “Stranger Into Starman” from Aimee’s album @#%&*! Smilers.  In this ambiguous little tune, Aimee references Anne Sexton and her anagram play with the words rats and star.  I do love poetic references in songs and my latest poem came out of a workshop where we worked with anagrams and form.

Aimee has a new album coming out this spring called Charmer and an upcoming concert at the Two River Theater in Redbank, NJ through Music Works Entertainment.  She shared with me some of her songwriting process.  It was fun breaking down the lyrics to “Stranger Into Starman” with her.

Here are the lyrics and then Aimee’s thoughts:

I turned “stranger”
Into “Starman”
In the Sunday
New York Times
Like Anne Sexton
With her star rats
Working backwards
‘Til it rhymes

For the love of God
You can’t tell me again

For the love of God
You can’t tell me again

With a pencil
And eraser
I’ve rewritten
All your crimes
I turned “stranger”
Into “Starman”
In the Sunday
New York Times.

That was a moment that really happened to me.  I was doing the NY Times crossword puzzle and then I wrote Starman in and it just meant something to me in a specific way because it related to somebody that I was dealing with who essentially was a stranger.  When I wrote that in, it had the impact of ‘Oh, I’m making this person into almost this exalted creature and he is a stranger.’ It’s sort of overestimating the value of a relationship. But to me it makes it less interesting to try to describe it because at the end it’s like, ‘Eh. It’s a snippet of some dumb co-dependent relationship where you’re overvaluing a relationship that really can’t bear that much weight.’

You hope that by showing the snippet that the flavor of the dynamic is built in somehow and that people can feel it so that it doesn’t have to be explained. The Anne Sexton thing—she’s having almost this hysterical bipolar moment.  Rats and stars and rats and stars. But realizing it’s really the other way around. It’s this awful thing and clearly, I felt that same kind of impact.

Aimee’s songs have such strong lyrics, I asked her which comes first–music or words?

I always kind of start with music and chords.  As soon as I play chords there will be some kind of melody that comes along with that. The melody has a certain meter to it and that suggests the words.  Also, the mood of it will suggest things.  I’ll kind of listen to it and ask what does this feel like? What story would make sense with that feeling? Where is this feeling in my life and where have I seen it before? How can I personally relate to it or create a narrative that this feeling makes sense with?

Aimee’s work on the film Magnolia won her a Grammy and garnered an Oscar nomination.  I wondered if there was a visual component in writing since she’s worked with filmmakers.

A little bit, yeah.  Sometimes I can visualize what’s going on.  Sometimes that not really as much of it, it’s more of an internal description than an external one. But it’s always nice to have some detail.  I mean, that really anchors people in a song if you have some sort of description.

And now just to round things out, here’s a YouTube video of Til Tuesday’s first NY concert doing “Voices Carry.”  Remember this song?