Aimee Mann – Wise Up (1999)
I promised that there wouldn’t be any fangirling on this site, but let’s face it, I wouldn’t blog about music and artists that I didn’t feel strongly about. Don’t like it? Start your own blog.
Let’s face something else: I’m not alone in my adoration of Aimee Mann.
Her given name is alternatively spelled as the French word for ‘loved’. I don’t know where else to begin in describing the artist herself. She has garnered the respect, nay, reverence of fully every single one of her contemporary musicians and critics alike. The praise starts with her songwriting, but also leaks out to her voice, her musicianship and floods into her delivery, which, in both studio and performance, can only be described as painfully honest.
There’s a lot to goon about in Aimee’s songs. Her lyrics are direct and alt-poetic. Her voice lines are eminently singable, and her instrumentation is the work of a pro, but modest. But it’s her harmonic sense that really tells her musical stories. Tonally, she’s intrepid. If we fed most ‘Mann’ chord progressions into a GPS, we’d hear the word “recalculating…” constantly. Jagged edges and sudden jolts in the accompanying harmonies are papier-mâché’d by smooth, tuneful vocal melodies that are accessible to anyone with a tin ear. In fact, for most of her songs, if you sang just the voice part without any harmonic accompaniment, it might sound variously dull and nonsensical. All parts in, though, her songs explode in the tear ducts.
And so it’s a point of personal irony that the first song I ever fell in love with by this impossibly rich artist displayed exactly the opposite featureset of what I’ve just described.
Around eight or nine years ago, I was at a movie theatre – I don’t remember the movie, might have been Inception – watching the ads before the previews before the movie. One of the ads was a Public Service Announcement for our provincial blood services agency trying to encourage donors. A movie theatre is a great place for any promotional messaging; you’re passive and relaxed and your receptors are wide open. It’s also, who knew?, a great place to hear music for the first time.
The image on the screen was of a young child in a hospital bed, head turned sideways to face the camera, with the IV pole in equal focus, other elements in a dreamy (or nightmarish) blur. A solo piano starts playing.
The chords are dulcet. It’s a single chord, actually, a D-major in the right hand, syncopated against a simple ostinato in the left, which effectively changes the changes the chord with its single notes. It’s beautiful and simple and plaintive and sad. It’s slow, repetitive, rhythmic. It barely moves, just shifting between two very closely related chords, almost like a comforting caress.
The voice enters against that piano pattern with just two slow simple notes an octave apart. Low A, high A. That’s it. There’s no musical story there. The piano is talking to us, and the opening lyric could just as appropriately have been spoken. Aimee chose the next best thing, a single note in two octaves. Then she does it again. Another caress.
Then the piano and voice swap roles. The voice line steps down in a tripping rhythm until it reaches the lower A it started from. The piano, now, is just gently putting primary major and minor triads directly on the beats of the measure. The voice is now the caress, the piano playing the stoic supporting role. It’s a lovely interplay of instrument and voice, a dialog that speaks in ways that no other artform can.
A songwriter that has never, not once, not ever, branded herself in any way, adopted any persona, used any kinds of talkshow platforms or event bashes, nor tailored her product to top-40 radio rotation, sold one new fan five albums that night with just 28 seconds of simple, perfect musical brilliance.
