(As she told Nylon, “It’s a lot more fun to have a lemonade stand than to work for McDonald’s.”) She won the folk album Grammy for her last solo LP, 2017’s “ Mental Illness.”
It was then too that Mann formed her own label, SuperEgo, through which she continues to release collections of her subtle, Beatles-y story songs, marked by her coolly minimal yet boldly center-stage singing. In 1999, she wrote songs for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” that, far from a typical soundtrack, also functioned like musical theater, woven into the plot. Mann is known, however, for crafting understated tunes that not only soundtrack devastating stories but propel them. “There’s a gallows humor to her discussing her time in McLean that I appreciate.”Ĭoncept albums filled with classical music and explorations of depression and suicide may be rarities in mainstream music today. “I relate to some of her chaotic thinking, how that fueled her writing but also made it so hard for her to ever find a place to land,” Mann says of Sexton. One of Mann’s songs, a waltz, is about former McLean patients, the poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, and the album’s title comes from the 1959 poem “You, Doctor Martin” by Anne Sexton - “And I am queen of this summer hotel / or the laughing bee on a stalk of death” - who also spent time at the hospital. Mann tells me this one Tuesday morning during an interview about her new album, “Queens of the Summer Hotel,” a collection of elegant baroque pop songs that she completed prepandemic for a planned stage adaptation of the 1993 memoir, “ Girl, Interrupted.” The best-selling book chronicles author Susanna Kaysen’s stay at the McLean psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts in the late 1960s, and spawned the 1999 movie of the same name, starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. Though the songwriting luminary first emerged into the cultural consciousness in the mid-’80s as the spiky-haired singer and guitarist in new wave sensations ‘Til Tuesday, it is now - as a 61-year-old Angeleno peering through her thick glasses into our Zoom call, donning a pale blue turtleneck and her hair neatly pinned back - that she feels most profoundly out of step.
Aimee Mann has never felt like more of a musical outsider.
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