Aimee Mann’s last album, a Grammy winner in 2018, was bluntly called “Mental Illness.” So where do you go from there? How about a song cycle based on a book set in an actual menta…
’s last album, a Grammy winner in 2018, was bluntly called “Mental Illness.” So where do you go from there? How about a song cycle based on a book set in an actual mental institution? “That’s on-the-nose, I know,” she laughs. “Yeah, there was definitely a part of me thinking, well, this is a frying pan/fire scenario.”
VARIETY: Broadway productions and even off-Broadway stage shows can often be in development for a decade, or more … and still not get produced in the end. It has to be a patience-testing process for someone who is used to being able to make albums and put them out. Was there a point at which you decided, “Hey, I don’t need to wait for this to land on the stage – this works as an album”?Yeah.
Are there any classical composers specifically that you’ve alluded to that people might recognize… or might not, for that matter?a nod. [Laughs.] Not even to the level of a quote, but a flavor. The song “Home by Now” has a bit of a Mozart piano… some trills. Some of the other ones I wanted to have a Debussy flavor. But really just the merest whiff of a flavor, because obviously I’m not really conversant in classical music and that’s not my wheelhouse.
The last script that I saw used a handful of songs, definitely not all of them. But that was maybe a year ago. Obviously the pandemic has really put everything on hold, and as you said before, these things could take a decade. Meanwhile, though, I have a record and I feel like I have a nice representation of the songs as I heard them, in more or less the order I heard them, and that’s fun for me. I mean, it always is sort of sad if you feel like you’re writing music that nobody will ever hear.
I think most of them still work as songs. I mean, some of them you do need a little bit of a context for. “Suicide Is Murder” is not necessarily a song I would written outside this project in that particular way. Because it’s taken from a monologue of the narrator of the book, where she talks about her own suicide attempt and what she thinks is the mindset that you have to be in to attempt suicide. And I put my own thoughts and feelings into it, because that just happens inevitably.
Naming the album after something Anne Sexton wrote, you’re sort of crossing narratives a little, or referring to something outside of “Girl, Interrupted.” Is there significance to you wanting to use that as a title? Do you have any sort of overriding thoughts on psychiatry and the treatment of mental illness in this? You have on the one extreme that kind of satirical or ironic point of view with the psychiatrist character. And then on the album you end with a note of hope: “I See You.