Aimee Mann - Bachelor No. 2

If you were to ask me my list of favorite songwriters, 90% would easily be men. I’m a man, I relate to things from that perspective. I’ve asked multiple women about this and their list would be 90% women. I think this makes a lot of sense. However, when there is a female singer-songwriter that I am drawn to, I tend to get really deeply attached to the work. This is true of Courtney Love, Chrissie Hynde and Aimee Mann to name but three.

I don’t remember how I came to Bachelor No. 2. Of course, I’ve thought “Voices Carry” was brilliant ever since it was released - even at a young age I could understand that was different than the other songs on the radio - but I am not sure how I heard about this record. I was reading a lot of British music press at the time, so that’s a safe bet, but it’s just a guess. I just know that when I read whomever gushing about it while at the same time discussing how Geffen didn’t want it, I needed to go get it.

Even twenty-four years later, I just listened to the record in the car with my girls last night, the easiest way to describe this record is it just feels familiar to me. She is a great lyric writer, but if I’m analyzing the songs purely on that, they would be hit and miss for me as far as what hits home. The songs are musically interesting in arrangement and chord progressions, but that alone won’t get me either. It’s the sum of the parts. It’s the instrumentation, the timbre of her voice and when that lyric hits just right, it cuts right through me.

That feel definitely inspires my own art, though I know she’d probably dislike my music based on things I’ve read. I really want to create a space that others can feel comfortable inhabiting. Especially those, who like me, don’t have any real spaces to feel comfortable in.

I’ll end on a personal anecdote. When this came out in 2000, I was twenty. I had exited my teenage punk years and I was both personally and musically transitioning to adulthood. I was huge into British music at the time: Oasis, the Beatles, the Stones, Stereophonics, the Stone Roses, etc. I had already stepped aside as a songwriter to play guitar for another songwriter. I was writing songs on acoustic guitars, as much out of necessity of not annoying other people as anything. I had no direction. As I drove to South Carolina with my family on vacation (I drove solo) and then later took a solo day-trip to Savannah to wander around, I listened to this album over and over again. It showed me what was possible as a songwriter. Which gave me the courage to move to Los Angeles a year later. I might have been better off as a writer to not have gone to L.A., but to someplace else because the land of creativity is so chained down by the industry of producing palatable pop music, but nonetheless. She is probably the first artist I felt attracted to that made the art she wanted to make and still found a way to make a living doing it outside the system (and prior to the internet being what it is now). No, she didn’t knock Britney Spears off the Billboard charts, but you can’t argue she wasn’t successful on her own terms.

And that’s all I’ve ever wanted.