Aimee Mann has taken to boxing and pulls no punches on her new album about a doomed relationship, writes Anna Carey
Aimee Mann may look like a sensitive singer songwriter, but the author of some of the most affecting and beautifully crafted songs of the last decade is tougher than she seems. "I started boxing about a year and a half ago," says Mann, speaking from her home in California.
"I've always been interested in it. And once I started I really liked it. It's very exhilarating, and there's something very satisfying about getting into the mindset of overcoming your fear and remaining calm when punches are being thrown at your head."
But there's more to her love of boxing than the fight itself. "Boxing is very complicated. . It's such a skill. And there's something fascinating to me about things that appear to be simple from the outside and turn out to be complicated and subtle."
Mann could be describing her own music. Over the course of five solo albums she's written songs that start out like straightforward folk- and pop-tinged rock and turn into something much more interesting. And perhaps her most interesting work to date is her extraordinary new album, The Forgotten Arm, a sequence of songs which tells the story of a boxer and Vietnam vet who's also a drug addict and the woman who falls in love with him when she sees him at a state fair in the early 1970s.
While Mann never planned to consciously write a concept album, she says that there's not that much difference between The Forgotten Arm and her previous work - in a way, she's always made concept albums.
"When I'm writing songs, themes always develop as I go along. So when I write songs over a certain period of time, they're going to reflect the same interests, or things that are happening in my life. Actually, it's more difficult making sure the songs are about different things than making them similar. And I've always been interested in people like this - dysfunctional people, crazy people." But until now Mann had never written an album that, however loosely, told a story, a story that has its roots with one song.
"I had written the song, King of the Jailhouse, and it seemed to be about two people who run away together," she says. "I kept picturing scenes from classic road movies, and at that point I decided to make more fully developed characters."
She started rewriting some other new songs to give more details about the couple - "how they met, what happened between them. It was surprisingly easy - I felt as if I was writing songs for a specific movie."
Unsurprisingly, The Forgotten Arm is a strangely cinematic album, recalling Peter Bogdanovich's adaptation of Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show - a bleakly beautiful picture of small town America in the early 1970s. "Yeah, that's it exactly," says Mann. "That's how I pictured it."
In fact, both musically and lyrically, the album has a very 1970s feel, with echoes of everyone from Stephen Stills to early Rod Stewart. "I was thinking a lot about music from the late 1960s and early 1970s - the music I grew up on. To me, the story was a southern story and a road story, and I wanted the music to match the time and place."
Mann also drew on the 1970s' casual attitudes to drugs and addiction. One of the album's best songs, Clean Up For Christmas, contains the line: "I was thinking I could clean up for Christmas . . . four more weeks couldn't make any difference."
"We've come very far in treating drug addiction," she says. "I remember growing up in the 1970s and there were so many drugs in my peer group. There was a feeling that, well, of course you'd take drugs, and if you didn't like them it was just a matter of finding the right drug for you. There was this cultural imperative to take drugs that you couldn't really get away from, but there was no focus on the fact that you could easily become a drug addict who needed help." And if you did, you mightn't even realise it.
"At least nowadays most people are aware of the concept of addiction and compulsive behaviour. But in the '70s it would have been more difficult to get help if you had a drug problem."
Mann has written about the isolation and loneliness of addiction before, notably on her last album, Lost in Space. "I think isolation is a big part of your life, even when you're the person who's with the drug addict rather than the addict himself. If you're an addict no one else knows what you're going through or why you can't just stop. And if you're trying to have a relationship with an addict, no one understands why you don't just leave them or stop talking to them. I think they the couple] run off together because they're trying to escape that isolation."
It's not the first time Mann has been inspired by cinema - her music played a pivotal part in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, and she has appeared on screen, notably in the Coens Brothers' The Big Lebowski. "I'd like to do more soundtrack stuff," she says. "It's always unpredictable, though - I've written stuff specially for movies and the scenes have been cut."
She has no plans to do any more acting. "I try, but it's so hard! I don't know how people do it, I really don't. It's such an incredible skill, recreating emotions and mental states."
Mann did, however, make a memorable appearance in the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, performing with her band in the show's regular club, the Bronze. "I wasn't a Buffy watcher," she says. "But when I got the invitation I asked around and literally all my friends were like 'oh my God, you've got to do it!' They were big fans. So I did it and it was fun."
Vampire-filled Sunnydale is a far cry from the dusty world of her new album. In the absence of their own film, the couple's story plays out through the cover art of The Forgotten Arm. Inspired by pulp fiction books and magazine covers, the illustrations in the album's packaging perfectly compliment the lyrics and contribute to the story itself.
"The visual element is really important to me," says Mann. "Actually, I think that's also a result of growing up in the '70s, because when you bought an album it often had a great gatefold sleeve or an inner sleeve with lyrics printed on it. You got these elaborate packages and that was a very exciting part [of getting a new album]. I've always wanted to recreate that experience with my albums."
With or without its artwork, The Forgotten Arm could be Mann's best album. But what does the title mean? "'The forgotten arm' is the invention of my friend who taught me how to box," she says. "He's a fascinating character who kind of inspired some of the character in the album - he was a boxer for a while and a drug addict for most of his life. But he had these odd little names for his boxing moves, and one was 'the forgotten arm', which I thought was such a great name."
And could this move bear any relation to her music? "Well it's one where you're hitting the other guy with your left hand and distracting him so he totally forgets about your right hand, so you just punch him with that one." She laughs. "It's a move of misdirection."