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Aimee Mann songs have a literary quality to them—sharp, spare short stories set to music—so it was probably inevitable that she would one day make a concept album, the musical equivalent of a novella. The Forgotten Arm (SuperEgo), her fifth solo release, is exactly that: a dozen songs that tell, rather loosely, the story of John and Caroline as they meet, fall in love and road trip across America. As Mann was writing the songs over the last year and a half she had an image in her head of a couple ultimately headed for trouble. “The guy’s a Vietnam vet and a boxer, but he’s also a drug addict, and she’s trying to get away from the dead end world where she lives in the South. They run off together and wind up in casino town, like Reno or Vegas, and their relationship falls apart. I didn’t have a really hard and fast plot line, but I was just generally thinking about them and how they met at the Virginia State Fair, where, being from Virginia, I spent a lot time.” The sound of the record also became part of the concept. “I pictured it taking place in the early ‘70s,” says Mann, “during my own experience at the state fair at that time—you know, that kind of white trashy redneck factor which I have a real weakness for. So I wanted the sound of the music to also reflect that time period because I have this really vivid memory of the songs they played at the fair when you’re riding the Himalaya.” The first song, “Dear John,” launches the story with this: “Cotton candy was king / on the midway that spring / when I saw you in the ring on the lawn.”
Mann has never been one to make too much of her musical influences, but here she proudly wears them on her sleeve: The Band, Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection, Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story and, oddly enough, Mott the Hoople. “Actually, when the guys and I were recording, I described the sound as Mott the Hoople meets alt-country. And not that I listened to Mott the Hoople so much, I just have a very specific memory of being invited to go to a Mott the Hoople concert but I had to go to a family reunion. So it all kind of ties into it, you know, the groovy rock concert that I never got to go to.”
Produced by singer-songwriter Joe Henry, The Forgotten Arm is a departure for Mann in several ways, not least of which that it was recorded over just five days last summer. “Joe makes records really fast and he makes them in a very natural way,” says Mann. “He sort of cast the members of the band well”—including Sheryl Crow’s guitarist Jeff Trott; Julian Coryell on additional guitars; Jebin Bruni on keyboards; bass player Paul Bryan; and Victor Indrizzo and Jay Bellarose on drums—“and then we just made the record fast and simple.” It is also Mann’s most straightforward rock record to date. “I liked the idea of sounding more like a live band,” she says, “so there is a similar guitar sound form song to song. On all my other records, each song has a totally different approach, completely different guitar sounds, lots of little interesting moments that happen, with tons of little overdubs. This time I was like, Nope. One guy playing one thing for the whole record. It takes a lot of nerve to just turn shit off. We only had four or five instrument playing: piano, bass, guitar, that’s it. It’s just great playing.”
Mann has also taken to writing songs on the piano for the first time and that, too, has affected her sound. “I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor,” she says, “and that’s really part of the vibe, too. Piano is kind of key for me on this record. “Jebin gets a real kind of honky tonk thing going—he’s a real 70s jam band kind of guy—so he was the perfect player for this record.”
Piano is not the only new skill Mann has picked up since her last recording. About a year ago she took up boxing, hence the album’s title. “My friend who boxes has this move he was showing me and his name for it is The Forgotten Arm. It’s like when you have someone on the ropes and you’re hitting with your left hand and you have you’re other hand between the two of you and your opponent forgets about the right arm, so you can bring it in for an uppercut. To me it’s about the fact that the knock out punch is always the one you never see coming.”
The one aspect of Mann’s new release that is carried over from her last album, Lost in Space, is her continuing fascination with, and exploration of the contours and despair of addiction. “In the ‘70s,” she says, “Everybody thought drugs were just good times. People didn’t really know about drug addiction, or that such a thing existed. When I grew up in the ‘70s I thought you had to take drugs. It was almost like I didn’t think you had a choice. And so when I was thinking about these characters and this time and this place and thinking about the idea of someone who, even if he starts to realize he has a problem with drugs, other people don’t. It just wasn’t in their vocabulary, this idea that you couldn’t handle it. The whole verb ‘to party,’ makes it sound like it’s all fun.” In general, though, Mann employs the idea of drug addiction in her lyrics as “a helpful stand in” which allows her to “describe all the lesser or more complicated or more subtle or more obscure states of mind that I’ve been in before. Everybody kind of understands, Oh yeah you take drugs and it does something to your brain and then you can’t stop. It’s easier to describe that shame, that horrible feeling of not being able to control your own life.”
In the end, The Forgotten Arm is, like so much of Aimee Mann’s music, really about the inexorable pull of co-dependency in human relationships. “The King of the Jailhouse / and the Queen of the Road,” Aimee Mann sings on one song, “think sharing the burden will lighten the load / so they pack up their troubles in an old Cadillac / that's her in the mirror, asleep in the back.”
