In 1983 she formed the band ’Til Tuesday with drummer Michael Hausman ’80, who now is her manager. Mann’s entry to the music business came when she began playing with various groups in Boston’s early 1980s punk scene. These days, Mann is calling all the shots, making music on her own terms, and releasing it on her own SuperEgo Records label. She spent a decade wriggling free from unworkable contracts, wrestling to gain ownership of her masters, and then went after Universal for releasing old demos without her okay. The struggles reveal her to be an artist with a rare and deep conviction to her art. Others might have decided to adjust their dreams and find a new line of work, but not Mann. The David and Goliath–like battles between Mann and her foes at her former record labels (Epic, Geffen, Imago, and Interscope) raged over artistic control. On the flip side, she has proven herself to be a formidable adversary who doesn’t shrink from conflict. What is known is that in her professional life, she has been vulnerable to the slings and arrows of the record industry. Whether her confessional lyrics are informed by events from Mann’s own life, the lives of others, or neither, is known for sure only by Mann.
Yet in other songs, such as “Humpty Dumpty,” the lead-off track from Mann’s latest CD Lost in Space, the song’s narrator portrays herself as someone quite vulnerable:īut I’m not the girl you once put your faith in Sometimes she takes aim at her song’s antagonist as in “It Takes All Kinds” from her 1999 CD Bachelor No.
Aimee Mann’s legions of fans know her as a gifted singer, guitarist, and tunesmith whose lyrics frequently explore the darker corridors of the human psyche.
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