Description
Mental Illness is Aimee Mann’s quintessential statement, tempering the discord of life with elegant chamber folk. Mann fills her songs with ordinary people struggling against operatic levels of pain.
Aimee Mann doing an album called Mental Illness is a concept so fitting it took her a lifetime to find it. Having already delivered a new wave smash, scored an Academy Award nomination, recorded eight stylistically diverse solo records as well a fiesty collaboration with punk’s Ted Leo, Mann is rightfully pissed that she’s nevertheless pigeonholed as a dreary fabricator of slow, sad-sack songs. So she’s answered her critics with her slowest, sad-sack-iest album yet, one populated by ordinary people struggling against operatic levels of existential pain at odds with their humdrum lives.
The 11-track album, which was inspired by her favorite Sixties and Seventies folk-rock LPs, features a core studio crew of Jonathan Coulton (acoustic guitar, backing vocals), Jay Bellerose (drums), Jamie Edwards (piano), co-writer John Roderick and longtime producer Paul Bryan (string arrangements). Ted Leo, who recently collaborated with Mann in their joint side-project, the Both, adds background vocals.