[insert 40 years ago today joke here]

I've been reading a couple different things about the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band coming out.

But the best thing I've read so far is Aimee Mann's Op-Ed in the Times. I can really identify with Mann's contention that it's almost children's music--it was the first Beatles album I can remember listening to, and I definitely played with the fake mustaches and all the stuff that came with the record (Why? They could be worth some money, now). Damn. Check out those mustaches, seriously.

And I agree with her that it doesn't stand up quite the way that other Beatles' albums have. Marchese over at Audiofile touched on the same thing, although I think a little more callously, and without as nuanced a reading of the way that people relate to the disc.

In a lot of ways, I think it's a very successful stepping stone for people in their appreciation of music. Whenever it gets at you, you can bet it's probably more thick with care than what you've been listening to before. If you're a little kid, you're going to respond to the bright colors of the jacket, the bright colors of the songs. And as Mann alludes to, if the shimmer of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" draws you in, "A Day in the Life" plants a darker seed, and isn't that what growing up is often about? A recognition not of nothing so much as a wider world out there that's both more wondrous and more strange than the one behind you?

When I re-discovered the album after I had begun playing guitar, I was drawn to the structures--the cleverness of the "Sgt. Pepper's" reprise, the massiveness of "A Day in the Life." Do those things come off as too clever by half now? Yeah, they do. Abbey Road has held up as an adventurous and unbelievably cocky album--what other band would throw five amazing pop songs at you, then only play them for a minute apiece? And Rubber Soul and Revolver are now feted as the hipster favorites when it come to the Fab Four. Revisionist history has led us to the conclusion that you can hear the Beatles' growing disinterest beginning with Sgt. Pepper's, continuing through The White Album, and only getting brushed aside on Abbey Road. Keep in mind, however, that the Beatles are really only competing with themselves when it comes to the album format.

Anyways, for no other reason than Mann wrote that Op-Ed and because I've been listening to her a lot recently in the wake of watching "Magnolia" again, here's an article on her I wrote a while back ...



A majority of songwriters I hear treat songs more or less like diary entries. But there are also songwriters who treat songs like chemistry experiments, blending words and imagery together until they achieve a reactive compound. Here I’m thinking of Jeff Tweedy’s experiments with chance operations to mix up Wilco’s palette, or The Books work with found sound and snippets of spoken dialogue. And of course, the vast majority of music produced in these United States treats songs like candy bars or light beer. A song is a commodity, a blank screen onto which to project a pop singer’s personality, image and attitude in an attempt to sell more. And then there’s Aimee Mann.

“I’m from a different era,” she says by phone from Los Angeles.

I’ve caught her in the studio a few weeks before she’s set to start an acoustic summer tour, and she’s busy tracking, of all things, a Christmas album. “Probably half of it is traditional stuff,” Mann says. “I did write one song for it and there’s a Michael Penn Christmas song that I thought was really great that I did. A couple of goofy things like ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.’ You have to throw in a little humor.”

A Christmas album is probably not the first thing you’d think when you think Aimee Mann, provided you’re familiar with her history. After doing time in the major label pop world with ‘Til Tuesday, Mann struck out on her own with two solo albums (1993’s Whatever and 1995’s I’m With Stupid) that both received critical acclaim but very little in the way of support from Imago and Geffen Records, respectively. Most people probably picked up the plot with her breakout contributions to the soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” in 1999. Since that time, she’s released three studio albums (2000’s Bachelor No. 2, 2002’s Lost in Space and 2005’s The Forgotten Arm) and a live album. She’s a unique talent who’s managed to forge her own path through the music industry.

What makes Mann unique is her approach to songwriting. She creates characters who aren’t just thinly veiled slices of her own personality- they’re living, breathing people with psychological depth. Think about it this way: Whenever an author (or songwriter) creates a narrative, there are at least three people involved- the author, the narrator of the story and the story’s protagonist. In confessional songs, these three personas are squished so close together as to be almost indistinguishable from one other, whereas at the other end of the spectrum, with someone like Britney Spears, the goal is to completely hide the author and the narrator from view so that the persona of the song’s protagonist becomes overwhelmingly dominant.

Bear with me here, because this is about to get hairy. Whenever I get into talking about this, I have to talk about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. To make this as painless as possible, I’ll just say that for Tolstoy, his characters are tools created to demonstrate a point whose meaning they may or may not have access to. For Tolstoy, the narrator retains what Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called “a surplus of vision.” This allows the narrator to draw the reader to the conclusions that the author wants them to be led to. Dostoevsky, meanwhile, created psychologically complete characters who were basically wound up and set free to bump against each other within the pages of the book. Dostoevsky’s narrators don’t hold the secret to his novels; the secret lies within the characters interactions with each other. This is what Bakhtin meant when he talked about Dostoevsky’s dialogic style.

I swear to god this is a useful way to think about music. The key is recognizing that the narrator, when it comes to songwriting, is not the person who wrote the song (since plenty of singers don’t write their own material), but is instead an amalgamation of the person singing it and the musical arrangement around it. Let’s take “It’s Not,” from Lost in Space as an example. It’s the story of someone who feels detached in some essential way from the world, and Mann sets up the song beautifully with this image: “I keep going ‘round and ‘round on the same old circuit/ A wire travels underground to a vacant lot/ where something I can’t see interrupts the current/ and shrinks the picture down to a tiny dot/ and from behind the screen it can look so perfect/ but it’s not.” Note the consistency of the metaphor here. As the song progresses, she moves on to talk about waiting at a stoplight and watching as the lights cycle through: “All I have to do is depress the pedal/ but I’m not.” The protagonist is caught on the horns of a Hamlet-esque dilemma here- the problem is not deciding which way to go, it’s deciding to do anything at all. The bridge gives a hint at the cause of the dilemma- the protagonist has been hurt after showing him or herself to be vulnerable to someone they trusted. And then we get the sucker punch in the last verse: “So baby kiss me like a drug, like a respirator/ and let me fall into the dream of the astronaut/ where I get lost in space that goes on forever/ and you make all the rest just an afterthought/ and I believe it’s you who could make it better/ though it’s not.”

What’s entirely brilliant about this is how Mann finds a middle way between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky here. The last verse shows that the protagonist is fully aware of the essential problem that’s keeping resolution at bay- a desire to put your faith completely in someone else- but at the same time he or she simply cannot move past it. The structure and arrangement of the song, however, provides the listener a way out. The way the setting moves from an electric circuit out to an intersection and out into space; the delicate way in which Mann’s voice climbs up into a vulnerable falsetto before landing back on earth with the last line of each verse: The musical structure provides the narrative framework to show us, as the audience, that this situation that feels unbearable will pass with time.

“It’s like everything in the arts,” Mann replies when asked about her experiences in the music industry. “You can’t do it unless you really love it because there’s no guarantee that you can make any money or get any ego satisfaction out of it. You can’t get into that headspace of competing with other artists—where am I in the charts, or how many records am I selling. I have a manager to kind of think about all that other sort of stuff and I get to worry about making records and writing songs and what I’m going to do for cover art. Of course, nobody buys CDs anymore, so that’s kind of becoming an obsolete idea.

“I definitely come from a different era.”