The Elton John song Aimee Mann calls “just killer”
In the 1990s, when Aimee Mann’s record label, Geffen, asked her to start trying to write hit singles, she suddenly felt disconnected from the music she was making. She criticised record labels for trying to “remove everything that’s interesting” from her songs. The interesting elements she refers to is the intricacy with which she writes, something that has seen her be considered by many as one of the best songwriters of all time, but that doesn’t necessarily break record sales.
“My music is not going to sell outside a certain audience, so why not leave it alone so you don’t alienate the people who actually like it?” she said, “It takes a special skill to be a big star, and I just don’t have those skills, so there isn’t much point in me pretending.”
Mann has taken her craft incredibly seriously throughout her entire career, but especially in her solo work. She can create exciting characters throughout her music, taking complicated people and emotions that would usually be found between the pages of a novel and condensing them into a three-minute song. Her album art also comes into play, as she knows how much a record’s cover can reflect what’s contained within it.
Though a number of influences have come together to contribute towards the music that Mann makes, one album, in particular, highlighted how effective emotion can be in music and how vital album artwork can be in contributing to that emotion. It all stemmed from the very first album that she bought for herself.
“Madman Across the Water was the first record I ever bought myself. I saved up my allowance and went into the record store, and that was on display,” she said. “I’d never heard of Elton John, but I loved that record cover. It’s so ‘70s, with the embroidery and the jeans. That record hit it out of the park so hard that I was forever locked into this idea about album artwork as another way to transmit the vibe of the artist. All through my career, I’ve had to push back on this idea that album art doesn’t really matter.”
She continued, “Madman Across the Water is still one of my favourite records of all time. ‘Tiny Dancer’ is just killer. There’s something about certain artists who have a sense of melody and harmony that’s really dead-on. And certain singers just sound like they’re in pain. John Lennon had that, too, where you can hear it in his voice, like, ‘Man, what happened to that guy?’ That quality to the voice really resonated for me.”
Mann’s ability to convey emotion in her music and leave no stone unturned when making her art might have been against the ethos of her record label, but it is undoubtedly one of the reasons she has cemented herself as a great songwriter. That commitment to the craft of songwriting all came from Elton John and his hit single ‘Tiny Dancer’.
