Aimee Mann

Aimee Mann is not the sort of person who dwells on the past with self-defeating bitterness or crippling regret. Whether it’s the natural resilience of her psyche or merely the emotional callous accumulated after years of being used as a corporate speed bag by the music industry, she’s managed to let go of her past battles.

Mann’s well-documented battles with labels both major and minor could very easily have left her with an intense spirit of recrimination and malice, but she has wisely chosen to take the higher road by beating the system at its own game with the creation of her own label, Super-Ego Records, and the self-releases of Bachelor #2 in 2000 -- an album Interscope rejected as commercially unworthy -- as well as her latest studio foray, the evocative and brilliant Lost in Space.

Unfortunately, even as Mann forgives her trespassers and moves ahead, there are days when the business pulls her unwillingly back in, like a pop music version of Michael Corleone. Today, for instance; Mann has just spent the morning in court for the depositions in her pending lawsuit against the Universal Music Group over the release of The Aimee Mann Collection, a greatest-hits compilation that Mann contends was completely unauthorized and rife with sub-par bonus tracks that she would never have okayed given the opportunity. The case is an unpleasant reminder of skirmishes fought long ago and a preview of events yet to unfold; the wounds Mann has suffered at the hands of the music industry’s corporate vampires are still healing and lie just below the surface of her cool, willowy exterior.

"They are horrible, horrible people," says Mann, with a pause for composure. "Horrible. But the bitterness passes."

After the emotional roller coaster of her experiences with Interscope over the non-release of Bachelor #2, it could have been tempting for Mann to do a highly personal album on the perils of being swallowed by the voracious maw of the music industry. Instead, Mann opted for more universal subjects with which she is most familiar: alienation, heartbreak, loss, obsession, addiction.

"I seemed to be writing songs in a certain vein," says Mann of her latest release. "Then I realized there were songs that weren’t in that vein, so I thought, ‘I’d really like to have a consistent tone,’ so I gradually wrote more songs that went along with the theme and threw out the ones that didn’t go with it."

As Mann began assembling the pieces of her next recorded work, it came with the blissful knowledge that there was no one to answer to, although that scenario could have been just as intimidating for a songwriter who has been looking over her shoulder for most of her career. Mann was more than equal to the challenge.

"It’s a subtle thing; it’s the feeling of freedom to make Whatever decisions I needed to make in service of the record," says Mann. "Whatever I felt was going to make a better record. Not necessarily a more commercial record or a record I thought they would like, but a record that I felt was good, according to what I think is good. That’s the most you can ask for. If you at least think you’ve done your best, that’s a pretty good standard to shoot for."

Mann stops just short of labeling Lost in Space as a concept album. Although it features a string of songs loosely threaded together by a theme, Mann makes it clear that no more should be read into that than necessary.

"It seemed to me that after I gathered the songs together there were themes that kept cropping up," she says. "I just got the feeling that these songs belonged together. I don’t think it could be more thematic than it is. For instance, there are several songs that, to me, seem to be about addiction. I don’t know if I have that much to say about addiction. An entire record about addiction might get a little old; maybe two or three songs, but not 11. Obsession, compulsion, loneliness and despair, those I could stretch out over a whole record."