Aimee Mann

Aimee Elizabeth Mann (born September 8, 1960) is an American singer-songwriter. Over the course of four decades, she has released ten studio albums as a solo artist. She is noted for her sardonic and literate lyrics about dark subjects, often describing underdog characters. Her work with the producer Jon Brion in the 1990s was influential on American alternative rock.

Mann was born in Richmond, Virginia, and studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. In the 1980s, after playing with the Young Snakes and Ministry, she co-founded the new wave band 'Til Tuesday and wrote their top-ten single "Voices Carry" (1985). 'Til Tuesday released three albums and disbanded in 1990 when Mann left to pursue a solo career.

Mann's first two solo albums, Whatever (1993) and I'm with Stupid (1995), earned positive reviews but low sales. She achieved wider recognition for her soundtrack for the Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia (1999). Her song "Save Me" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song and the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal. Following conflict with her record company, Geffen, Mann released her third album, Bachelor No. 2, on her own label, SuperEgo Records, in 2000. It achieved acclaim and strong sales, establishing Mann as a career artist who could work outside the major label system.

In 2014, Mann released an album with Ted Leo as the Both. Mann also paints and makes comics, and has appeared in films and television series including The Big Lebowski, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Steven Universe, The West Wing and Portlandia. Her awards include two Grammy Awards, including Best Folk Album for Mental Illness (2017). She was named one of the greatest living songwriters by NPR and Paste.

Mann was born at the Medical College of Virginia, Richmond, on September 8, 1960. She had two brothers and two stepbrothers. When she was three, her mother had an affair and became pregnant and her parents divorced. Mann was kidnapped by her mother and her new boyfriend and taken to Europe, where they traveled. Mann's father, a marketing executive, hired a private detective, who brought her back from England a year later to a new stepmother and two stepbrothers. Mann said her father seemed "like a stranger" when they were reunited. The kidnapping gave Mann post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety around traveling later in life. She did not see her mother again until she was 14. She forgave her decades later, saying her mother had been "trapped on every side".

Mann grew up in Bon Air, Virginia, and attended Midlothian High School in Chesterfield County. She was withdrawn and would not talk, and her father and stepmother sent her to a psychiatrist. Her drama teacher recalled her as "kind of an insecure kid, very quiet, very introspective … When she did start talking, she was worth listening to." Mann learned to play her brother's guitar when she was confined to bed with glandular fever at the age of 12. As a teenager, she enjoyed David Bowie and Iggy Pop and was inspired by punk and new wave music. She said: "[It] was so interesting, so inventive – literally do whatever you want. That Patti Smith was out there and people were accepting her? Oh my God, there's a way out."

In 1978, feeling she did not fit in the "normal world", Mann enrolled in Berklee College of Music in Boston to study bass guitar. She had wanted to learn the bass as a child, but her family ridiculed her, saying it was unladylike. She lived on $25 a week, running in the mornings and practicing intensely. After 18 months, she dropped out and joined the Boston punk band the Young Snakes on bass. She was unhappy in the band, saying the other members objected to her writing love songs or music they considered too melodic. She joined the band Ministry, which she said helped her learn to write songs efficiently. In the early 1980s, she worked at Newbury Comics in Massachusetts.

At Berklee, Mann formed a new wave band, 'Til Tuesday, with Mann on bass and vocals. They signed to Epic Records and released Voices Carry, their debut album, in 1985. The single "Voices Carry" reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and won that year's MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist. According to Mann, "Voices Carry" was one of the first songs she wrote. Stereogum described it as "an early indicator of Mann's penchant for character study, drawing outside the lines of boy-meets-girl love songs". The success made Mann an early female MTV star. The Washington Post described her as "a neo-punk pop princess, a new wave glamour girl, all doe eyes, gangly limbs and spiky bleached hair with that long, braided tail snaking out from underneath".