Aimee Mann

Lost in Space is another marvelous collection of Mann’s intimate portraits of lost love and broken people, all set to a wry pop soundtrack that often lilts at the precise moment that one would expect dour melancholy. It is the ecstatic tension Mann creates between her often downbeat lyrics and her sprightly pop melodicism that is unique and has thus far made her impossible for major labels to classify and market.

"My goals were never to be particularly outlandish or left of center or avant-garde," Mann says with a dry laugh. "My tastes harmonically really run to classic ’70s chord progressions and melodies, and my ideas are pretty simple. None of that is crazy or experimental. From a record company viewpoint, everybody’s so worried about ‘Can this be turned into a million-selling record?’ and what’s required to turn it into a million-selling record is usually to remove everything that’s interesting. Their idea of commercial is so much more bland than mine. 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?"

That’s a slightly more than rhetorical question Mann must certainly have asked all her labels along the troubled arc of her career. After the windfall success of ‘Til Tuesday’s debut Voices Carry in 1985, Epic Records tried tinkering with the band’s dynamic on its two subsequent albums in hopes of revisiting that initial commercial accomplishment. When the label couldn’t "fix" Mann’s unbroken musical creation and reached an impasse on the next ’Til Tuesday album, they stonewalled the band, tangentially causing its demise and ultimately making it legally impossible for Mann to record for nearly five years.

Once freed from the major label yoke, Mann had learned a valuable lesson and signed with independent Imago for her astonishing 1993 solo debut, Whatever. The album’s title was a double-edged sword that revealed the indifference she felt for the machinery of the music industry as well as determination to make music by any available means. Although the album garnered glowing reviews and exposure, Mann’s solo comeback was undermined by the collapse of Imago, who in turn blocked Mann’s move to Reprise and also enjoined her from recording for the better part of two years. After settling that mess, Mann perhaps rashly signed with Geffen, tossing her squarely back into the major label lion’s den.

Geffen released Mann’s sophomore solo disc, I’m With Stupid, in 1995, but only after a titanic tug-of-war over every detail. Again the album generated great notices, and the single, "That’s Just What You Are," wound up on the soundtrack to TV’s highly successful Melrose Place, but Geffen remained unconvinced that Mann had achieved her potential on the album. From Mann’s perspective, she was always doing more with less on Geffen’s stringent budget.

"Geffen had a policy of not having more than a little slip of paper and not even a booklet in the CD," says Mann. "‘No 8-page booklet for you, that would break the bank.’ Or, ‘Only black and white printing, no color. That’s too crazy for you.’ That was super cheapo and just not good value for money."

Before Mann’s next album could even be imagined, Geffen was itself absorbed in the Seagram/Universal deal; when Geffen was dissolved as a label, Mann was reassigned to Interscope Records. In 1998, Mann delivered Bachelor #2 to Interscope and was promptly told that some changes would have to be implemented to make the album release-ready. Mann insisted that the album was done, and the label insisted that Bachelor #2 would never come out in the form that Mann had delivered it.