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highyenas · 7 years ago

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here’s my take on mania

tw: personal experiences with bipolar depression

overall, i like mania. bishops knife trick, wilson, and church are definitely some of my favourite songs they've made to date. tlotro too, the new has worn off of it but it's still a solid track, and i have emotional ties to it because of the interactions i had with not only pete, but patrick as well due to its existence (i've never cried so much in my life). so that's a pretty special track.

though, there are a few things about it that feel off or incomplete. or unnecessary.. ex: the llamas ,, please no more i can't stand them

the things i don't really like include "are you smelling that shit?", and how they chose the word "boost" for heaven's gate of all things - it sounds weird to me but i've gotten used to it, no big deal. i still can't get really into stay frosty, sadly.

some tracks feel incomplete or too repetitive, champion being the biggest contestant here. it's too generic, its meaning is too obvious, unlike most of their songs. i appreciate the idea it's conveying, though. it released at a time i was fighting with my mom and step family really badly so it helped me through that a lot, but it is still very generic and i can't really get past it.

then - young and menace. i just don't like this track. i remember listening to it as soon as it came out in awe but not in a good way. it didn't feel real. is that what i really heard? at the time of course, i grew to like it because i was just happy they were back making music. do i like it now? not really. - but if you look at the song from an artistic standpoint, as a audible presentation for manic depression, it works very well. i can appreciate the song in that light. my grandpa has bipolar disorder and i've been through at least 4 of his manic episodes - at one point he's as sweet as he can be - the next my aunt is fainting because of how terrified she is of him. the contrast between the soft verses vs the chorus (which i feel like could be shorter with more variation with each) represents it well. but do i think it should have been the leading single? of course not. so many people still have a bad taste in their mouth from it and can't look at mania well because of it. first impressions and all. i understand if they were excited (or rushed) to get something out but i feel like if they just waited until they made a song like tlotro, reviews on this album would be much more positive.

now i don't just have negative things to say about the album, but i feel like a good fan should critique what's given to them, not just take it in blindly and never question the methods, or never theorise on what could be done to improve it. but a fan should also appreciate the values it has within it too, "what makes it this album special?" "what makes this part unique?" "don't you just love how (band member) did this?" i'm sure they appreciate the feedback as well. nobody wants an audience of zombies who still say "thanks pete".

(also if you guys could not comment shit like that on sensitive or serious subjects it would be really great - people seriously commented "not bad joe" on joe's post about his mother's passing.)

track by track review (excluding y&m and champion since i pretty much covered them)

* stay frosty royal milk tea

this song left a bad taste in my mouth before i even heard it - im easily influenced by how people hype things and how every yeemo trinity kid was freaking out over the title really drove me away. - but the track itself isn't bad. it's very powering and has memorable, strong lyrics like "the only thing that's stopping me is me". the track feels like someone wanting to become great as they can possibly be but they are plagued with obstacles and downfalls - "the alcohol never lies", "some princes don't become kings", but they recover and keep trying. they're resisting failure. (allusion: it really reminds me of ling yao trying to seek immortality for his country in fmab, ahaha. it fits perfectly. "some princes don't become kings.") the track isn't bad at all, just not my cup of tea. i can really appreciate it.

* hold me tight or don't

i don't have much to say about this track, im not too big of a fan of latin themed music but it's a nice poppy song with lovesick lyrics that go deeper than usual pop love songs. i've grown to really enjoy it. to me it sounds like someone desperately holding onto a lost relationship and being pretty frustrated with how their significant other treats them, but they're so obsessed they don't want to leave.

* wilson (expensive mistakes)

when i first heard this song on a live recording i fell absolutely in love, the music sounds nothing like i've ever heard before and it's truly captivating. and when i heard it live myself, oh wow. it was amazing. i've seen someone else say this, can't remember who, but they said they believed it was touching on how irrational people with manic/bipolar depression can be. once again, i have personal experience from my grandfather and i really do believe that's what they're trying to do. "i hate all my friends." this is sort of personal and i don't usually talk about mental illness, but this for me personally reminds me of how my grandpa nearly convinced my dad into touching an electrical unit that would have killed him. but when he's on his medication for his bipolar disorder, he loves my dad. i believe the same concept is used here, the narrator doesn't actually hate his friends, the disorder convinces him he does whenever it kicks in. also the secondary title (expensive mistakes). this could be referencing how people with bipolar disorder have a lot of trouble managing their money and often splurge. my grandpa went ahead and bought 2 grave sites for himself and my grandma during one of his episodes. it's not a nice thing to witness.

* church

this song immediately grabbed my intention as soon as i saw the title. i love the music and choir in this song so much, butch's (their producer) bass line is very nice and i love listening for it. also i adore the "if death is the last appointment then we're all just sitting in the waiting room" part. it's a little repetitive but not in a generic way like champion, it has a lot of other things going along in it. - i'm not religious whatsoever but i love religious imagery - it's so fascinating and it's very easy to manipulate it into something twisted. i feel like church is simply referencing how people do absolutely absurd things for their faith and the narrator is willing to do all of those things for their significant other. they are holy. a deity. - or maybe it's just about sucking dick.

* heaven's gate

when i saw the title track for this song i was hoping we were gonna get some more cult related lyrics. unfortunately not really, but there is a couple that may be referencing it. "out of my body, and flying above." the heaven's gate cult believed that the body was merely a vehicle your being, (i don't know if they used the word "soul") would essentially leave and enter the next stage in existence, away from earth, possibly on an aircraft, reunited with god. the other one is "go in the world and start over again and again, as many times as you can" the cult believed that god came as a human on earth to warn those of when the world would be recycled, or, restarted. once as jesus, the second as applewhite. a little farfetched, but it's something to consider. - it could also just mean you keep trying to keep your faith but you just don't make the cut for heaven, hinted at in the following lines after it. overall i really enjoyed this song, "boost", like i said, took a little getting used to but it's alright. i really love the music and the bridge is amazing. it's nice to see them incorporate other genres.

* sunshine riptide

this song immediately became my favourite when i heard the previews - i absolutely love the reggae and i think burna boy did an excellent job. he really spices up the track. this song sounds really pleasant but it's got some of the deeper lyrics on the album in it, blatantly talking about pills, drinking and smoking. it sounds as if this song is guiding you through a manic episode but using substances to mask it - as many do. it has a heavy narcissistic feel to me, burna boy even calls himself "god" at the first part of his verse. it also touches on relationships again, possibly blaming them for the cause of all of their emotions. "you came in like a wave when i was feeling alright." give this song more credit, it deserves it. it truly is a riptide, it's so aggressive and it has so much stuff going on in it.

* bishops knife trick

here it is, my favourite. this song - i can't even explain how much i love this song. it's like a slow rock ballad with a modern twist, it's so beautiful. the bridge makes me break down into tears almost every time. - sadly i feel like this song may be referencing pete's suicide attempt - "these are the last blues we're ever gonna have" - and you probably all are aware what blues mean. ativan. also "im just a full tank away from freedom" i feel like this could be referencing a full bottle of pills to death, but that may be stretching it. on a lighter note, this is totally chicago is so two years ago part 2, just on a sadder note. it's an amazing closer to the album.

many people say mania is too jumbled and inconsistent - i do believe this was their intention since bipolar disorder is unpredictable. though, it could have a better arrangement to flow smoother, perhaps they could've made the second listing for the listening experience, and the original for the more artistic presentation of the album.

is mania my favourite album? no. is mania a bad album? no. is it their best? no. do i like it? yes.

overall, i feel like this album was a success and im very grateful for their fearless experimentation. this era has been quite an entertaining, pleasant experience so far. i give it a 7.5/10

#mania review #mania #fall out boy #fob

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toddrundgren-interactive · 8 years ago

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Nothing/Anything: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren

From Here to Utopia

by David Fricke for Trouser Press, July 1978

Todd Rundgren lies comfortably against a pillow on the living room floor of his Bearsville, New York retreat, located just off a winding, ill-paved driver’s challenge called Mink Hollow Road. Against one knee-high landing is a row of records encroaching its way across the room. The first one, front and center, is a copy of Rundgren’s first solo album, Runt, no doubt the result of a quiet stroll down memory lane.

“Actually, I just produced a punk album by Jean-Yves Labat – M. Frog – the original synthesizer player in Utopia. One of the tunes is a re-working of a song from that album called ‘I’m in the Clique.’ His new album is called Froggy Goes A’Punkin’.” Right there, in barely over 25 words, is the gist of Todd Rundgren’s stormy ten-year career as one of American rock’s most prodigious and, at times, petulant geniuses.

Alternately a defiantly individualistic solo artist, a much-sought-after producer of hits for other occasionally less-talented folk, and the democratically inclined lead guitarist for a band and ideology called Utopia, Todd Rundgren is all things to only a few understanding people. His records with and without Utopia since 1973’s A Wizard, A True Star have sold at a modest but discouragingly fixed rate of approximately 200,000 a pop – enough to keep his commercial momentum at a respectable pace, but not enough to keep him from languishing in the shadowed obscurity that is the scourge of all cult figures. But Rundgren would seem totally unaffected by his inability to make a large-scale artistic impact on an audience he feels is brainwashed by the false promises of 70s pop and the insensitive record industry prophets that make them. Much like the Number 6 character portrayed by Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, Todd Rundgren writes for himself the role of a man who consistently defies the powers-that-be who, in this case, would emasculate the creative potential of any single musical project he might care to name. He will cite such scurrilous activity as going back as far as his celebrated late ’60s stint with Nazz and then detail the problems he claims he faces in pursuing a musical career, either on his lonesome or in the company of fellow Utopians. Take, for example, his solo recording contract with Bearsville Records. “I deliver albums on approval. I’m not obligated to deliver any albums to them, but I can’t take an album to another label either. I just sort of do what I feel like doing and they have the option of putting them out or not putting them out. The way they behave when I deliver them, I don’t understand why they bother. You’ll have to ask them.”

I did just that, calling Bearsville’s California office to ask company head and long-time Rundgren confidante Paul Fishkin about Rundgren’s business circumstances and the company’s attitudes toward the music Rundgren says they have no commercial faith in.

“There is a certain level,” Fishkin replies, “on which Todd likes to think of himself as independent. He’s also a very – what’s the word? – mercurial personality and much to his credit he’s never wanted to be categorized. That’s what makes him so unique. But that also makes it very frustrating for us because we would like to sell more records.”

So would Todd, but for him, that’s not the bottom line.

“That’s another argument I have with the record company. They feel that selling 150,000 albums in this day and age makes you irrelevant, that it has to be a million and a half albums to be worth anything. Their whole attitude is like world conquest or manifest destiny where you’re just supposed to expand and expand and expand in the same way the economy does until you hit your recession and your economy collapses.

“I don’t particularly feel that way. I feel that it seeks its own level. I can’t force it any greater. I’m not attempting to be anyplace, underground or overground. I’m just attempting to do what I feel I should do in terms of making records.”

Fishkin, a week later and 3000 miles away, makes Todd’s point for him.

“He makes the music in his head at a given moment. And that music is the story of his life at that moment.”

Raz-A-Ma-Nazz

The fourth largest music market in the country, Philadelphia nevertheless endures a perennially bad rock’n’roll reputation. The East Coast industry focus makes an occasional stop there, paying due respects to the bastard children of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand – that South Philly brigade of acne-free faces like Frankie Avalon and the imminently forgettable Fabian – with more recent tributes paid the R&B factory run by Philadelphia International’s Gamble and Huff.

As a result, the city’s young white rockers still fight an uphill battle trying to make even their own local audience aware of the talent developing there, only to find their fortune in a two-hour drive to the north. The psychedelic joyride we now know as the late ’60s found many of Philly’s aspiring rock bands coming about as close as they ever would. Mandrake Memorial, Edison Electric Band, Elizabeth, Sweet Stavin Chain, High Treason – they all snagged fleeting moments of recognition with albums of fair to excellent quality. But by 1968, there was no question about who reigned supreme, even if they didn’t gig with the same regularity and took a casual pass on hippie ethics. Nazz – generally through the services of the still-18-year-old Todd Rundgren – were unanimously, if begrudgingly, voted most likely to succeed. That, in the end, Nazz dissolved in a flurry of infighting and managerial mishaps, Rundgren attributes more to the times than the place.

“Nazz was certainly out of context in the sense that it wasn’t typical of what was happening at the time.”

Rundgren has been talking about his own musical tendencies at any given time vis a vis those considered in vogue at that given time. It is a theme he sounds throughout the conversation and Nazz is just another case in point.

“It wasn’t exactly out of context,” he submits, “because we were the premiere local band at the time. We did have a large following. But the Nazz was considered out of context because the music that was happening was not at all like ours.

“First of all, everybody was taking a lot of drugs. The whole thing was that late ’60s music evolved out of this street-level thing, like San Francisco and so on. Like, ‘hey, blues.’ Except I’d already gone through the blues trip with Woody’s Truck Stop.”

Actually, Rundgren had been through that and more by 1967 when Nazz first reared its Anglo-foppish head. He could count to his credit the usual Beatle-copy and Britrock cover bands like Money (the same heard at the start of side four of Something/Anything). As a young, impressionable lad growing up in the depressingly nondescript Philly suburb of Upper Darby, he ignored Elvis Presley (“A lot of people who emulated him were machismo-greaser-killer types who were always out to kill me.”), opting for what he describes as the “art school personality” personified by the Beatles, “wanting to be a little different and strange and still have people like you.”

Come 1966 and Rundgren fancied himself a budding white bluesman, heading for center city Philadelphia and joining forces with an early hippie configuration, Woody’s Truck Stop, which held forth at the bohemian Walnut Street hangout called the Artist’s Hut. Paul Fishkin, who managed the Truck Stop for a time, describes the group as “sort of the Grateful Dead of Philadelphia.” However, their few claims to fame were Todd, a marginally excitable album on Smash (post-Todd), and a guitar player by the name of Alan Miller who raised a court ruckus when his high school suspended him for not cutting his hair to a regimental length. Such were the times and the times were not with Todd because he was (depending on whom you believe) either tossed out of the Truck Stop for not taking drugs (Fishkin’s story) or because he didn’t like the band’s drug scene (Todd, natch).

His next stop was what he calls “high concept,” a very Beatle-y trip to include singer-organist Stewkey (from the group Elizabeth), bass guitarist, occasional songwriter, and old friend Carson Van Osten, and ex-Munchkins drummer Thom Mooney. Stewkey remembers that it was Todd and Carson who formulated the idea for Nazz, then recruited him and Mooney to complete the band. As Nazz, they eventually released the first so-called progressive rock record out of Philadelphia (“Open My Eyes” b/w “Hello It’s Me”) and, with the debut album Nazz, defined an entirely new 1967 sound that could be described in today’s terminology as “power pop.”

“Nazz was a high concept band,” reiterates Rundgren. “We emulated a lot of English bands like the Who and Small Faces and really wanted to be as big as the Beatles, so we conceptualized everything on that level. The music was designed to have more of a common denominator, play more of an eclectic thing – a lot more vocals than what was happening at the time. At the time, everything was endless guitar solos. We had long conceptual songs, but even those were a high level of composition, as opposed to dropping acid and jamming.”

But was it just guitar solos and acid? Few of the bands, local or otherwise, who played Philly’s psychedelic showplaces like the Trauma, the Electric Factory, and the Second Fret coffeehouse even dented the charts with their extended paeans to the new consciousness. A glance at any one of the Top 100 lists of the late ’60s would reveal the Beatles at the height of their power, the Who slipping in every once in a while, and American groups like the Grass Roots, the Union Gap, and Paul Revere and the Raiders taking their turns with alarming regularity. If anything, Nazz’s neo-Whoish energy wedded with Rundgren’s gift for writing inescapable melodic hooks should have made them prime contenders.

“Well, Nazz wasn’t really counter to things that were happening,” he’ll say, implying that maybe it was more the creative atmosphere which was at fault.

“As I recall, a lot of my influences at the time were popular, but in other aspects. Like Jimmy Webb and the type of things he was doing influenced me to write ‘A Beautiful Song’ (the extended orchestral opus on Nazz Nazz). It’s just that we were joining a lot of disparate influences in the Nazz and it was a combination that wasn’t necessarily accessible.

“It’s also conceivable that the Nazz could have been more successful if our management had been a little more realistic. If we had played around more consistently and had a chance to develop our performance to the extent that we were developing our recording, then things might have happened differently. But our manager had this theory that if we had played around too much, we would establish ourselves as having a ‘low’ price tag. He was very money-oriented, mostly because he spent money at an incredible rate.”

So even with the first album, Nazz were left to their own devises. Despite production credits for Chicago producer Bill Traut (Shadows of Knight, etc.) and, on “Open My Eyes” and “Hello It’s Me,” Michael Friedman, Rundgren says that Nazz went the whole thing alone. “He (Traut) just sat there and read the trades while we were working. Then he mixed the album and a couple of hours later flew back to Chicago. We wound up remixing the whole album anyway. Michael Friedman was the partner of our manager at the time and he just wanted to have his name on the record somewhere. But all he did was sit around…”

…and read the trades, no doubt. But the end result soon obscured any of the shit flying around in the managerial arena. Nazz was and still is a refreshing, uplifting experience, totally lacking in artistic pretension. The rock (“Open My Eyes,” “Lemming Song,” “When I Get My Plane”) is raw at the core with a distinctive and imaginative polish to complement the gentility of ballads like “If That’s the Way You Feel” and “Hello It’s Me” (still an undeniable classic reflecting the urban soul colorings of Rundgren’s musical upbringing). Only “Crowded” bears compositional credits other than Todd’s (“Wildwood Song” is a group effort), in this case Stewkey and Thom Mooney. So while Nazz was not totally a Rundgren showcase, it set an auspicious example for the future.

Somebody then had the ingenious notion of sending Nazz to London in the fall of ’68 for recording purposes, sheer brilliance when you consider the wealth of English influences displayed on Nazz (the opening chords from “Open My Eyes” are straight out of the Who’s “I Can’t Explain”). Work permits being what they are, Nazz finished only one track in their two weeks there – a Carson Van Osten song called “Christopher Columbus” that later showed up in re-recorded form on Nazz III. (The original version of “Christopher Columbus” along with a different studio take of “Open My Eyes” can be heard on The Todd Rundgren Radio Show, a 1972 Bearsville promotional issue.) Nazz then headed for California’s sunny climes to do the second album and there the problems began in earnest.

“The Nazz always had internal problems, personality conflicts. For instance, the lead singer, Stewkey, was not inspired to do a lot except sing. Originally he was supposed to be an organ player, but he never practiced organ. I had been playing piano in the meantime and subsequently, by the time we got to the second record, I ended up doing most of the keyboard work.

“The drummer, Thom, and I had constant conflicts of an ego nature that had nothing to do with the professional direction of the band. We would get in the studio and if I were to say ‘play it this way,’ he would purposely play it another way, just to keep things going. By the time we got to the second album, we were just stomping in and out of the studio, fights all the time and shit like that. It was not the best set-up internally.”

Stewkey takes some exception to Todd’s criticisms, concurring that, yes, there were internal problems but Todd was just as much a part of the proceedings. As for his own role as organ player, “Todd knew that I didn’t play well. I never took piano lessons or anything. I just started to play as a music fill-in at the time. And I proceeded to get into the singing aspect of it. I never thought I was meant to be a virtuoso.” He does, however, play all of the ivories heard on Nazz.

When queried about Todd’s domineering role as composer, arranger, and de facto producer, Stewkey claims that ‘Todd always felt like he was the only one anyway. It got to a point where we weren’t even important anymore. On the second album, for instance, there are some tunes that I’d never heard before I even got into the studio. He would be off by himself and we didn’t even know what he was doing. A lot of hassles went down with the band and he just separated himself from them.”

For Rundgren, though, the breaking point came with a controversy involving the group’s second album, released in 1969 as Nazz Nazz. As he explains it, all of the material found on both Nazz Nazz and Nazz III came from the same 1968 Hollywood sessions, done after Nazz returned from London. Together they would comprise a double album – at least, he thought so – entitled Fungo Bat. (“We were really getting out there…” – Todd.) But the real bone of contention for Todd was the fact that on most of the Nazz III tracks he, not Stewkey, had originally sung lead vocals.

“I wanted that record to be a double album, including all the material. In fact, we had a whole double album mix. Somewhere around here” – Rundgren gestures casually across his living room – “I have the lacquers or the master tapes of it.

“But they (meaning a combination of band members and record company higher-ups) decided to make it a single album and on the songs I sang removed my voice from the master tapes and put Stewkey on instead. That became Nazz III.”

Yet Stewkey was just as surprised to see Nazz III in a record store in Madison, Wisconsin almost two years later. Regarding the erasure of Todd’s voice from the tapes he comments, “They just didn’t sound good as far as I was concerned.” “First of all, I didn’t want a double album. I thought it was bad timing – we had a hard enough time selling a single one. And a lot of that material on Nazz III shouldn’t have come out.”

If that was the case, why bother to overdub the new vocals? “They – the record company and the people involved in it – wanted me to.”

While Rundgren claims that was only one of the points of dispute within Nazz, the Nazz Nazz controversy was his last. He and Carson Van Osten took their leave almost simultaneously. “Carson was a pretty mellow, easy-going guy and just didn’t like the situation,” says Todd. “I split shortly after that.”

Stewkey and Thom Mooney kept a version of Nazz alive until mid-1970, when Mooney split for California (only to resurface briefly on albums by the Curtis Brothers and Tattoo with ex-Raspberry Wally Bryson). Carson retired to a promising career as an animation artist, Stewkey eventually hooked up with Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen for a couple of short-lived projects, and Todd set his sights on production work. With hardly more than two years and three mildly successful records to show for them, Nazz dissolved without a whimper. Easily years ahead of their time, they swam upstream in a river of sonic psychodaisical jive that, with their Marshall stacks and tie-dyed shirts, had no time for classic pop melodies. Today, the rock’n’roll pundits would call it power pop and “Open My Eyes” would be a Top 10 charter all over again. Or would it?

Stewkey: “We went too fast. I think if we had played around and functioned like any band that takes two or three years to get up the ladder, we would have hit really big.”

Todd: “If Nazz were together now, it would be really sick!”

Promise ‘Em Something, Promise ‘Em Anything, But Give ‘Em the Hits

Ironic, isn’t it? Todd Rundgren’s latest solo opus, Hermit of Mink Hollow, currently garners more airplay and public attention within a month of release than most of his recorded output since the puzzling Wizard. Both the solo and Utopian Rundgrens have been making undeniably curious if not totally accessible music for nigh on those ensuing five years and while even Todd admits to certain flaws in the flow, he won’t even recognize criticisms of his refusal to follow the pop path laid out by the gold record success of 1972’s Something/Anything. Add to that a prestigious track record of hits produced for other folks and you wonder where one – Todd, Runt, Utopia, etc. – ends and the other begins. They all, in fact, begin in 1969.

More interested in “developing a musical style without having to deal with someone’s reaction to it,” Rundgren passed on both forming a band and going solo in order to acquaint himself with the wonders of the studio. It would be fair enough, then, to say that Rundgren’s decision to head straight off for the console instead of the microphone has colored his solo and group activity since. Although his voice has become almost immediately recognizable, all Rundgren records possess a studio gleam, a definitive “sound” that can only be his, and the same goes for, among others, the Hall and Oates, Grand Funk, and Meatloaf records he has produced with variable success. Whatever the content, however recorded, they all literally scream “Rundgren.”

About his “sound” Todd says, “It’s very hard for me to describe it in words, but I know the difference between the way I produce and the way other producers work. For instance, my main area is in terms of the sound and the arrangements can vary very broadly. For example, I probably do the widest variety of types of production of almost any producer – country, blues, jazz-rock, straight-ahead rock’n’roll, nearly MOR, and then my own albums. That’s opposed to, say, Richard Perry who only does a certain MOR-type of album. He uses the same musicians, exact same drum sound – it sounds like a Richard Perry record with a different lead singer on it.”

Todd describes his first production assignment, a Philly band called the American Dream, as a “chance to learn certain basics” which proved beneficial in more ways than one. With the 1969 job came the opportunity to christen the just-opened Record Plant in New York. A brand new console and similarly shiny new equipment presented considerable deterrents for the three or four engineers who tried their hands at the Dream album. Finally, Todd took the matter into his own eager hands, working the board and subsequently learning the most advantageous thing you could possibly know as a budding young producer – how to engineer.

That ability allows him maximum control when recording himself or Utopia. Still, he insists that recording all by your lonesome – instruments, vocals, the works – is no big deal if you know your way around the limitations. Most of the instrumental and vocal work on his first two solo works, Runt (1970) and The Ballad of Todd Rundgren (1971), were his own with only rhythmic help from the Sales brothers (Hunt and Tony), some guys from the Band, and on one Runt track, from the American Dream.

In fact, Runt was recorded on speculation by Todd after Bearsville Records, for whom he was staff producer, gave him a budget (“as a concession”) and told him, literally, to go make an album. Prior to this, Todd had done some writing, little outside playing, and a lot of session-engineering, including the Band’s Stage Fright. Apparently Bearsville expected nothing much above the ordinary because, as Todd tells it, “when I brought back Runt, they were more or less shocked that I had actually done it and that it displayed a certain amount of originality. So they signed me up after the album was finished.” Nine months later, Bearsville figured they had some hot property. Through the good promotional offices of the aforementioned Paul Fishkin, “We Gotta Get You a Woman” (written for and about Fishkin) went Top 10 and everybody waited with baited breath for the follow-up. But The Ballad Of… spawned no hits, even if the stuff of which they are made was there in spades, and went on to an all-time sales dive for Todd. “That was my least successful album in terms of sales, although people say it is the most coherent in terms of songwriting and nowadays could be one of your across-the-board MOR-type records. But at the time it wasn’t fashionable. Nothing I do is fashionable at the time I do it.”

But if The Ballad of Todd Rundgren is an album Billy Joel would kill to call his own, then Something/Anything is the best album Paul McCartney never made and, in retrospect, it is easy to see how S/A can be singled out by (generally former) fans as the quintessential Todd, the absolute height of his melodic and lyrical powers. Here was a four-sided, 24-song declaration of independent genius, further set aside from the mainstream by two common denominator hits, the extraordinary “I Saw the Light” and a re-recording of “Hello It’s Me,” and, as Todd calls it in the liner notes for side one, “a bouquet of ear-catching melodies.” Besides, recording it was a cinch.

“I originally planned to do Something/ Anything all myself because on the previous albums I did everything except the bass and drums – the bass just being sort of a big guitar and the drums I had sort of fooled around with to some extent.

“The only challenge in doing that was playing the drums. Since everything was so highly arranged, it didn’t amount to a lot of complexity. It was essentially just arrangements, which was no problem for me. Y’know, sit down, take a half hour, and work out the part. After that, it was easy. “You usually start with the drums and it’s hard to play the drums to nothing, the reason being that halfway between the song you forget where you are. It’s hard going through the song, trying to sing it all to yourself, the whole arrangement, and keep it in your head without getting lost. And a lot of times, I would have to use an edit or two to get through the song. I’d forget and stop, but the first part would be so good that I couldn’t do it over again. I’d start in the middle, edit it together, and overdub everything from there.

“Since then, I’ve been influenced by a lot of R&B drum players, so the style’s a little different, a little more syncopated, more complicated turn-arounds and things like that. On Something/Anything, for the most part, I was playing rhythm, whereas on my new album, I’m playing, to some degree, what they call “melodic rhythm.”

“The operetta (‘Baby Needs a New Pair of Snakeskin Boots’) only took a day or so to do – three songs in one session and the rest in another. The other three sides only took like three weeks to do. I would essentially do a track a day, working on some stuff at home on the 8-track. I did ‘Breathless’ and ‘One More Day’ at home.

“I can’t remember, but I think Something/Anything was conceived as a single album and just turned into a double. I was writing material so fast that it became a double album. That was one reason why I changed my style so radically on the next album – because it just became too simple to write songs like that, almost mechanical. I would sit down at the piano and there would just be standard changes and combinations and lyrically it was the same subject matter. I had to break out of that rut. I didn’t feel I was doing myself creative justice.”

Ooops! Wrong Rundgren!

“In terms of cycles, I guess my apogee is their perigee and vice versa. I’m just cyclically 180-degree off from whatever else is happening. But it’s a big world and there’s a lot of people in the same boat as me and somebody’s gotta appeal to them.”

If only by default, that somebody is Rundgren, a rationalization that accounts for the continued release of records bearing his name, even if the general public and press corps eye each waxen item with the suspicion that there is something on that record they want little or no part of. To some, it’s the frantic instrumental deluge marking “A Treatise on Cosmic Fire,” a 30-minute epic from Initiation which Todd admits will appeal “to very few people that aren’t musicians. It appeals to musicians who want to hear something different as well as on a technical level, particularly people who are more or less removed from the mainstream of pop music.”

To others, the idealistic sociology coloring his Utopian lyrics should have nothing to do with the business of making popular music, a criticism that Todd vehemently denies. In again referring to the roundly panned Initiation, he insists that, like with any record or song, “I was determined to write lyrics entirely about something I believed in, rather than something I simply speculated about or had idle thought about.” The success and subsequent constant critical referrals to Something/Anything drained him, at least temporarily, of the urge to write love songs of the moon-June-spoon variety. A Wizard, A True Star and Utopia were the almost disastrous result.

“After doing Something/Anything, I had become deeply involved with production and sound. From that, I conceptualized this whole recording studio and built it from scratch. That was Secret Sound in New York and Wizard was the first album done there. The studio was designed to be able to produce all these sonic illusions and the whole Wizard album was an attempt to do that.”

A collection of songlets ranging from the fluid electronic backdrop of “International Feel” to the hard pull of those Philly-soul roots in the “Cool Jerk/Smokey Robinson/Curtis Mayfield medley, Wizard was certainly, as Rundgren indulges in characteristic understatement, “the most radical departure that I’d made up to that point.” His follow-up to Something/Anything, it could not help but alienate his substantial singles-buying audience. And the album scarfers had a time of it, too, something for which the aborted first Utopia tour can be properly blamed.

Undertaken in the spring of ’73 and lasting no more than three gigs, the first Utopia tour was an unmitigated bomb. Even in his hometown, Rundgren found few believers and while he admits that not a lot of folks had yet made the transition from S/A to Wizard, he feels it might have worked if his manager at the time, Albert Grossman (Dylan, Band, etc.) had shown a little more faith in financing the stage extravaganza. Still, survivors of the Philadelphia show opened appropriately by King Crimson can only babble about lengthy Mahavishnu-like jams, a large dome under which M. Frog conducted extensive business on synthesizer, and the black outfits offset by shocks of white fur on top of each and every head. It was trouble enough telling Rundgren from Moogy Klingman, much less sitting back and trying to catch a few bonafide songs.

Since then, Utopia – now a streamlined four-piece with Todd the only original left, in the company of Roger Powell, Kasim Sulton, and John Wilcox – has developed a stage show so high on P.T. Barnum showmanship that it’s no small wonder that Utopia’s tours are underwritten by record advances and royalties. Despite that, Rundgren says that all the Utopia records have been performance-inspired. “In all cases, the material was either performed live first or was designed to highlight the stage show, as with the Ra album and the sphinx and pyramid staging that went with it.”

But for every Utopia album, there is a solo Rundgren issue, a pattern to which he has no explanation. “Actually, Faithful preceded Ra by a considerable stretch of time and then after Ra, there was Ooops! Wrong Planet! which was another Utopia album. You see, I’d been pretty much totally involved with the Utopia road concept and, as a result, didn’t record a Todd Rundgren record in something like two years. We’ve been touring extensively, so our records have reflected our touring experience, whereas my solo albums are more or less closed environment things.”

The latest in the lengthening line of Rundgren solo projects, Hermit of Mink Hollow takes that assessment to its logical conclusion. Where Todd, Initiation, and Faithful were all recorded with a variety of Utopians and sympathetic outsiders, Hermit takes Something/Anything that final step further – it was produced, arranged, written, played, and sung by Todd R. with the unsolicited help of absolutely no one. What that has to do with the fact that it is his most immediately accessible album since S/A is anybody’s guess. Even Todd’s.

“In my solo albums, except for a few instances, I have always dealt in song styles. Initiation had at least one side of songs. Todd was very song-related, too, although it incorporated the instrumental stuff that came to a head on Initiation. Wizard was more like songlets, an attempt to break certain restrictions in songwriting. Faithful was all songs as well. In fact, Faithful was the penultimate song album in a way because I took archetypal songs of the ’60s like ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and reviewed those with a ’70s approach. Then on the ‘original’ side, I did my interpretation of those ’60s influences. So, for me, that was the ultimate song album, totally self-conscious song stylizations.

“As for the recent album, I wrote songs as an opportunity for me to sing as opposed to playing, which is what I mostly do with Utopia. It is a chance to do a number of different styles of singing and essentially highlight my voice.”

Case in point is the opening track, “All the Children Sing,” a light, harmonic exercise of vocal expertise overlaying a rhythm track of guitars, basic bottom, and harpsichord. The choral break in the middle, though, is a classic example of Rundgren’s studio methodology. You think you hear about a dozen little Rundgren’s ooh-aahing in the background when, in fact, Todd has overdubbed himself maybe three times to achieve the effect. And the same goes for the lead vocal harmonies. “When I do vocals, I essentially have a lead voice and three background .voices. The way that they are arranged is what gives you the impression that there are more or less. Essentially, it’s studio dressing. I used to double each voice in the background vocals. Now I just do them all with one voice. So there are actually less voices than there have been on previous albums. But the point is that I have different vocal control now and there is different technology for creating sound…” Here he pauses, as if to think of a way to summarize the recorded effect, “…sound-picture sound.” Technology not withstanding, Hermit of Mink Hollow literally glows with melodic light, a vivid aurora borealis of lyrical changes, high harmonies, and instrumental gloss. “Hurting For You,” “Bag Lady,” “Bread,” and “Fade Away” are all living testament, not only to Todd’s wizardly control of the mixer, but also to write songs that, despite possessing the obvious hooks upon which commercial success is hung, are head and shoulders above the AM and FM wallpaper against which Rundgren incessantly rails.

“Any record company executive now will tell you that people don’t listen to music and that’s what music now is designed to be — not listened to. It’s essentially wallpaper and people don’t want to hear music that puts them through an emotional trip, some kind of spectrum of feelings.”

On that account, notice the legend appearing on each side of your copy of Hermit. Side one is tagged “The Easy Side,” side two “The Difficult Side.” Be not dismayed because Todd assures you that this is merely a clever “in” joke. He explains that when he first delivered the album to Bearsville for release, the twelve songs were in an entirely different order. However, the company felt that demographic theories on such matters made a difference in his case (“These different theories on such matters made a difference in his case (“These different theories about listener response are supposed to override whatever it is you intended, the mood you want to create.”). Bearsville prexy Paul Fishkin feels that Rundgren “could make those changes and not affect the album as a whole, but he considers it meddling.”

In any case, Bearsville presented Todd with a list of songs they felt would program better together on one side (“Those tunes acceptable on the MOR crossover theorem…”) with the ones they figured were too challenging – in other words, annoying and grating” on the other. Hence, “Easy” and “Difficult.”

“The funny thing is that it makes no difference to me whatever. The only reason I did it was because, in that particular instance, it made no difference to me. I don’t know what the fuck they were talking about. So I did it, figuring it was their particular wank and they can think what they want.

“You see, record companies just sell the record, so they say it can be done. But it’s not their obligation to play it and then live with it once they do. That’s what is so hypocritical about the business. The artist has to live with what he creates. In that way, most things that record company people say to me goes in one ear and out the other.”

Todd’s relationship with Bearsville and the industry at large cannot be all that bad since he still makes records and at least gets them on the street, which is more than a lot of other die-hard idealists can say. And Fishkin admits to an undying respect for Todd’s independent stance. Still, respect doesn’t count in the $7.98 retail race.

“I guess,” he says in conclusion, “I’ll always be a revolutionary because I don’t want to be part of the establishment. I don’t care who the establishment is, either. I just want the option to be exactly who I am and, as a result, I will always be on the outside.”

Meanwhile, Back in Philly…

What, I’m sure you’re all asking, happened to that post-Rundgren Nazz that went to Dallas and eventually went the way of all has-beens? And what does Cheap Trick have to do with it?

Yes, these are questions to which you no doubt want the answers and ex-Nazz lead singer Stewkey was more than happy to oblige.

“After Todd and Carson quit the band, Thom Mooney and I went to Dallas bringing two people with us from Philly, a bass player named Greg Simpler and a guitar player named Craig Bolan, who used to play with Thom a long time ago in the Munchkins. As the Nazz, we played around the Southwest. We tried to hook up with some management people out there, but that didn’t work out. So we finally disbanded the group after about six or seven months. That was in mid-1970.

“Thom went to California, while I stayed in Texas. Maybe a year or so later, I got a phone call from Rick Nielsen. He wanted to know if I wanted to come to Illinois to sing with his band. So I went up there and sang with his band – it was called Fuse at the time.”

This version of Fuse came together after their lone Epic album (of which Nielsen has little good to say), was recorded. According to Stewkey, Thom Mooney played with Fuse for a time in Illinois, but left again, and eventually Fuse headed to Philadelphia and were rechristened Sick Man of Europe. The personnel changed with some regularity, with the band including at times Nielsen, Stewkey, Tom Petersson (also of Cheap Trick), and Philadelphians Hank Ransome (longtime Philly drummer) and Cotton Kent (jazz-rocker and Sigma Sound session regular). As Sick Man of Europe, they recorded a number of demos which have since turned up on a bootleg album, Retrospective Foresight, as a collection of Nazz out-takes, although most of the tracks actually aren’t. It actually features Nazz III tracks, a live take of “Open My Eyes” that Stewkey thinks might be the Texan Nazz, and rough takes of “Lemming Song” and “Train Kept a ‘Rollin’.” The Sick Man of Europe tunes on the record are “I Ain’t Got You” (a Stewkey original), “He Was” (another Stewkey comp), and Nielsen’s “So Good to See You” (billed there as “Ready I Am”).

In any case, Sick Man eventually brought in a drummer from Illinois (not Bun E. Carlos) whose name Stewkey can’t remember. And then…

“I don’t know. I left again. Actually, I got fired. I just had bad luck with two bands.”

Stewkey is now living in Philadelphia, doing sporadic writing and, for awhile, was gigging acoustically in a duo. When asked about his personal relationship with Todd during the Nazz period, he refers back to Todd’s aversion to drugs.

“When I was playing with Todd when Nazz was first together, I’d like to go out and get high. And he didn’t like that. I thought Todd really got impossible after awhile. If we weren’t working and I wanted to go out and see a chick or get high with a couple of friends, he’d really get upset about that. Which I didn’t understand. Y’know, people like to have fun, Todd.”

#todd rundgren #david fricke #trouser press #articles #interviews #long #70s #78

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tune-collective · 8 years ago

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Aimee Mann Finds 'Mental' Health Returning to a Quieter Solo Career

The singer-songwriter released her ninth studio album, ‘Mental Illness,’ on March 31.

Sometimes you finally have to gravitate back toward what Irving Berlin called “doin’ what comes natur’lly” — and in Aimee Mann’s case, what comes naturally is slower and somberer. “I gave myself permission to make a record that was everything I imagine people think I am… super depressing and bordering on mentally ill,” she says, referring to a new album that is titled, with tongue-in-cheek probity, Mental Illness.

For anyone attuned strictly to the contemporary hits world, the album — which dropped Friday (March 31) — may come off as the downer sardonically promised, but most Mann fans will have an ironically ebullient response to the drift toward an exquisite minimalism in her first album in five years. During her time away from the solo limelight, she worked with Ted Leo on the duo project The Both, which didn’t do anything to diminish the cult she had built — as evidenced by the number of shows already sold out on a spring tour that begins April 20 at Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Theatre and wraps up May 13 at L.A.’s Theatre at Ace Hotel.

Talking with Billboard, Mann touched on why she has momentarily abandoned rocking out, where she and her producer fell on the Bread-versus-Nick-Drake divide, the varieties and definitions of mental illness, and whether Donald Trump counts when it comes to the titular subject.

Mental Illness marks a big a stylistic change-up from your last couple of projects, (2012’s) Charmer and (2014’s) The Both, which had a lot of power pop going on. This one is all about the mellow gold. Was there a conscious thought during the writing to make a pendulum swing back toward quieter sounds?

I just like the idea of having a record you can put on and have it, from beginning to end, deliver the same kind of lonely, melancholy, dark, wistful experience. I wanted to get away from bigger production. And with the Both record, that production was pretty stripped down — but it was a rock band, and I didn’t feel any real pull this time to try to write more up-tempo or rock songs.

After touring in smaller rock clubs as a trio and playing bass with The Both, I decided to write a record was the distillation of what I assumed people thought of me, if they thought that my songs were very down-tempo and very sad. But I really wanted to take it all the way stripped down, kind of like Leonard Cohen-type things, back in the real folk days — that was my initial goal. It definitely ended up more fleshed out than that, but that’s where I was trying to keep it. I think people might be ready for something super-sad and soft. But another part of it is like, why not? Because there’s a certain liberated feeling in the idea of knowing that nobody buys records anymore. If nobody buys records anymore, you can really do whatever you f—ing want!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxQg4VVNKGQ

Did you and (longtime producer) Paul Bryan talk a lot about touchstones?

We had a lot of conversations before we started about the sounds that we were trying to go for and sample records, without trying to imitate anybody. He was a big Nick Drake fan. People always tell me about Nick Drake, but I’m not personally that familiar. But acoustic with strings — that’s kind of his deal, right? I was also listening to a lot of really soft ‘70s rock, like Bread and Dan Fogelberg… you know, the finger-picky stuff. Going for as soft as we can get it was kind of the goal.

You recently released a Carpenters cover (“Yesterday Once More”), but no one is going to compare this album to the Carpenters too much.

No. And the Carpenters song was for [Martin Scorsese’s HBO] show Vinyl, and I think they were trying to just do a straight copy, to make it sound as much like the original as possible. That was a Joe Henry production.

You’ve mentioned Bread a number of times, but your writing sensibility is so different, no one is going to listen to the new album and think, “Oh, this is just so David Gates.”

I was listening to a lot of Bread, but more as a sonic reference, along with things like Loggins and Messina’s “Danny’s Song.” And we listened to some Bill Withers, “Ain’t No Sunshine.” My question was, how stripped down does a record have to be to retain the feeling of being stripped down, or can it have strings? Can it have bass? Can it have some percussion? Because I did want it to sound really bare. I was curious to go back to certain records and see really what kind of acoustic guitar sound they had: Was it strummed? Was it plucked? Mostly there was fingerpicking, which I’m not really that good at, so I had to get my friend Jonathan Coulton to do the fingerpicking stuff. So that was the brief: to see what acoustic guitar sounds went with other sounds to still make it sound really sparse.

More of the songs than not on this album have string arrangements, but they’re generally pretty subtle. Did you look to string arranger Paul Buckmaster’s work with Elton John back in the day for any inspiration?

We looked at Paul Buckmaster as a model for one specific song, the last song on the record, “Poor Judge.” Because I felt like that could be just piano and strings in that Madman Across the Water, “Levon” or “Tiny Dancer” (vein). This is my theory about his arranging: that he arranges strings like a horn section. They often take the melody in unison, and they’re very stabby and punchy, more horns than strings were arranged up to that point. So we looked to him for that song.

But Paul Bryan, who wrote all the arrangements, is more of a big Nick Drake fan, and I was actually just talking to him about it last night. He said another influence was this Brazilian artist, João Gilberto, who had this record (in 1976) called Amoroso. He said he liked the sound of the icy strings next to a warm voice. I was skeptical of the idea of strings on almost every song. It’s not as simple as my original concept for the album. But every arrangement was so different. On some, strings would just come in on the bridge, so it still retained the feeling of an acoustic or really stripped-down record. Some of the strings were more prominent, but I think from song to song, it varies enough so it keeps it interesting.

You haven’t shied away from giving people fair warning about the album’s downbeat qualities. But do you think fans experience it as depressing? Good songwriting always has a quality of exhilaration no matter what the tone or subject may be. And just as someone who’s feeling down may get some hope out of looking at a self-help book just because it puts a name on what they’re experiencing, you put a rhyme on people’s experience. That can feel uplifting even if the lyric captures a seemingly hopeless moment.

Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel. I read Facebook posts (about current events), and if someone has a real succinct sum-up of a horrible thing that’s going on, it’s uplifting, because it makes you feel less alone and that maybe together this is a problem that could be solved. Feeling isolated in your problems and your feelings is kind of the worst part of it. If you feel like somebody shares it and is also thinking about it and how to get out of it, to me, that’s an uplifting experience. I think people like to think somebody understands the more difficult things that they go through.

Just to ask a little about some of the imagery associated with the album. “Goose Snow Cone” was inspired by the cat of the title, and you used the actual Goose in the video, where she’s in some mortal jeopardy. And then on your album cover, you have this strange, chick-like creature seen through the thorny brambles of some dark woods. Is there some kind of theme going on with winsome creatures experiencing some kind of darkness?

I felt like that cover got at the psychological world of that subconscious stuff that’s all dark and murky, but there’s this creature, and it’s kind of a monster, but it’s also sort of cute and funny. That’s kind of the attitude I have about having issues and writing songs about your issues and writing songs about other people’s issues — that it is dark and difficult and it’s a little scary, but also, there’s an element of humor about it. You know, we’re all struggling with the same kinds of things, and there’s definitely an element of humor in recognizing one of your crazy things in other people, or vice versa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhThS-PJOFE

Although there aren’t many happy songs on the album, you managed to deliver some cheer and light into the world with the “Goose Snow Cone” video, which of course is an actual cat video. She experiences a health crisis in the video and spends some time with the vet, but you didn’t actually kill the cat. I felt confident you wouldn’t.

My friends post a lot of pictures of their cat, Goose, on Instagram, and she’s got white fur, and she really looks like a snow cone ball. So I start writing this song, and it’s really more about being homesick and lonely than it is about the cute little kitty. It’s very dumb that I kept the name, but once I wrote the song, I was stuck with it. Her owners moved out here, so I put Goose in the video. Goose is a good cat. She’s very photogenic. She wasn’t really cooperative. I was amazed what they did with editing where they got shots later that made it look like she was cooperating.

You have some more famous faces in the video for “Patient Zero,” but the song itself has some different things going on, and seems to be about a young person coming to Hollywood and finding success elusive. “Patient Zero” is a quintessentially spooky L.A. song, with references to The Big Sleep and Day of the Locust and the enticingly out-of-reach lights of the city. You know a lot of people in the film business. Is it worse than the music business, as far as being a mass frustrater of dreams?

I suspect that the movie business is worse than the music business. At least in music, it is possible without a ton of money to make some kind of recording and put it out into the world in some way. You can’t really do that if you’re an actor — you’re at the mercy of bad scripts and bad directors, and the politics, whether it’s studio politics or other actors who dislike you. I wrote that song about… well, not really about, but inspired by Andrew Garfield, who I met at a party years ago. It was before Spider-Man, and he had just come to Los Angeles and it was clear he did not feel like he fit in. I just had a moment of feeling like “You know, I kind of worry about this guy!” Because I felt like he is a real artist and very sincere, and I think to be a real artist the way he is, you have to be a very vulnerable person. And I just worry about vulnerable people. It’s not necessarily just his town, but in the world of big business, whatever that business is. I mean, he obviously did fine. But I think being famous is very difficult. It’s a weird kind of trauma and I think it makes people crazy. If everybody around you is saying you’re amazing and all your choices are great, there are no touchstones.

The life of the super-famous has special requirements. It’s a very rare person who can withstand it. My guess is that (Garfield) tried to have a career that’s a little more artistic and not focused on franchises. But somehow I was inspired to write this story about someone who comes to Hollywood with the promise of being in this big movie, and he’s maneuvered out of it. To me it’s almost a bit of a happy ending, because it’s like, this was never the place for you anyway. It’s not the town for me. And that was influenced a little bit by Nathaniel West and the people who write about Los Angeles in this more noir category (about the city’s) creepy underbelly.

Did you ever feel that way about your own fame, even if it wasn’t on a Hollywood blockbuster anchor level?

With my brush-up with fame, when ‘Til Tuesday was popular for a minute, it was certainly weird, and I found it very off-putting, because I didn’t really like people looking at me. That made me feel uncomfortable. I think only a real narcissist enjoys constant attention. To me, constant attention feels vaguely threatening. People expect things out of you you’re not going to be able to deliver. I don’t like that state. I like low expectations. I think about this a lot, because even in my own situation, if I’m on tour, and if we’re going into the hotel and somebody offers to carry my suitcase or something, it’s like “Oh, they’re being really nice because they’re my friend.” You can’t pretend to yourself that you as a person are so wonderful that people just want to carry your bags all the time! It’s not like people carry my bags, but still.

On this album, you have some songs about compulsive liars or drunks — just generally unstable people — and their victims including “Lies of Summer.”

I wrote “Lies of Summer” about somebody who’s had a specific kind of crisis, and all their lies and craziness exposed. I think once you realize that somebody’s a pathological liar, then you kind of scroll back through all the encounters that have just been slightly off, and then you see those in a different light.

“Knock It Off” is kind of a tough-advice song in the vein of “Wise Up” (from Magnolia). You almost seem to be invoking a Lloyd Dobler sort of Say Anything moment when you sing “Oh baby, knock it off, you can’t just stand there on her front lawn,” except you’re taking all the romanticism out of it.

That’s what people think of as the sort of cinematic/romantic moment, where you’re standing on somebody’s lawn, hoisting the boom box over your head. But it’s crazy behavior! It’s not taking no for an answer, which is not a great trait in a relationship. In the story of this song, this person’s behavior has just been so egregious, but after all his lies were revealed, he can’t understand why his girlfriend broke up with him. Like, ‘Why would you not trust me? I’m not getting credit for the 99 times when I didn’t lie!’ To me that’s fascinating, because that really is sociopath thinking. It’s always a fresh new day, and (the sociopath) is weirdly present, but sort of too present, because they forget that the past has consequences in the present.

There are other songs on this album that are encounters with crazy people. “You Never Loved Me” is about a friend of mine who was engaged to marry somebody and moved across the country to be with them, and they just disappeared on her. It’s certainly supposed to be a little bit wry and ironic and not entirely “Boo hoo for me.” I picture the narrator shaking their head and going, “Wow. You really stuck it to me. Good for you.”… I think sociopaths just don’t have that fear that most of us have, where we live most of our lives going “I hope this person likes me” or “Is my loved one mad?” or “How can I make this person happy, because it makes me happy?” We are connected to other people in an emotional, underground kind of way, and I think they’re just not.

Do you think there’s a clear delineation between people who have garden-variety neuroses and those who are mentally ill, or is it a sliding scale between us and some of your more disturbed characters? With the album’s title, were you thinking, ‘Everyone is mentally ill,’ in some certain loose way of thinking?

I certainly do think everybody’s got their thing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say everybody’s mentally ill. I’ve seen a lot of talk about Trump having narcissistic personality disorder, which I 100-percent agree with, but I don’t even know if that qualifies as a mental illness. There are definitely a few about a person I knew who probably is a sociopath, and those were kind of the main mental illness-y songs… I think another way to look at that is, people are trapped in compulsive behavior. I do think it’s on a continuum. Someone who’s just kind of garden-variety f—ed up, that has issues, of repeating the same mistakes or whatever, I don’t want to put that in the category of mentally ill. But I see how denial, when amplified and clung to, starts to encroach upon delusion.

I mean, we see it in our president. I don’t think that he can tell reality from the fiction that he has created. If he says something because he wants it to be true, I think at this point he believes that it makes it true. And I think that is delusional, and it’s hard to say that that kind of delusion is not mentally ill. But it’s self-created. I mean, I don’t think he started out schizophrenic and not able to tell reality from fantasy. I think that it’s a kind of willful, self-imposed brain damage. I definitely think it’s possible to walk yourself into that, just like you can walk yourself out of it one step at a time. Maybe not entirely in everything, but I certainly think there’s an element of work and help that you can take yourself out of being in a pretty bad mental state.

You see hope in these situations, but where does that come into the songs? A lot of them seem to leave the characters trapped, in their own bad behavior or in enabling somebody else’s.

I think with relationships, especially romantic relationships, the decisions you make are less decisions than blind impulses that are almost impossible to resist. Because it bypasses all thinking — even the times where you know, “Hmm, this person’s just like my mother,” or “This dynamic is exactly like the same dynamic I had with X, Y and Z.” I mean, I do it with friends, too. We form our patterns and we go to our spots, and it’s really cognitively painful to wrench ourselves out of those patterns. But it’s fascinating to see how the dynamic can change by just taking the smallest aspect of it and working on it. You can’t change another person, but if you change where you are in the cycle, then everything changes. I think that’s very encouraging and kind of weirdly exciting. And I think the interesting point at which a song gets written is the lament before the solution is either thought of or implemented. Sometimes there’s a benefit in just saying, “I give up, I can’t go on,” and having that moment before then you go on.

This article originally appeared on Billboard.

http://tunecollective.com/2017/04/02/aimee-mann-finds-mental-health-returning-quieter-solo-career/

#aimee #career #finds #health #mann #mental #quieter #returning #Solo

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