Aimee Mann

As a young girl, Aimee Mann was inspired to play the bass guitar after reading a book (that she later could not remember the title of):

It was this paperback about how to get into the rock ‘n’ roll business. It was fascinating. I didn’t know anything about music then. Out of the blue, I said I wanted to play the bass.

In 1981, she dropped out of Berklee College Of Music to join the punk band The Young Snakes but quit because she felt the music “turned out badly”. After a brief stint in the electronic rock band Ministry, she formed the new wave group ‘Til Tuesday with boyfriend (and former Berklee classmate) Michael Hausman.

The band won a Boston radio station’s popular annual battle of the bands in 1983 and signed with Epic Records. Their 1985 debut single “Voices Carry” went top 10 in the US, also reaching #15 in Canada and Australia. The band won the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist, but their next two albums gave Til Tuesday progressively less success, leading to an eventual 1992 breakup.

The following year, Mann released her first solo album Whatever on Imago Records spawning two modest hits in the UK, one of them also a hit on US alternative radio. In late 1994, Mann’s single “That’s Just What You Are” was included on the soundtrack for the popular TV show Melrose Place and reached #93 in the US in early 1995. The song was included on I’m With Stupid, released nine months later on Geffen Records.

Mann married Michael Penn in 1998. The following year, she contributed nine songs to the film Magnolia. The song “Save Me” earned her an Oscar nomination and was a minor hit in the UK.

That same year, after much struggling and infighting with Geffen Records, Mann negotiated her release from the label and founded SuperEgo Records, releasing Bachelor No. 2 in 2000. Penn, Mann and her manager (former Til Tuesday drummer Michael Hausman) also formed Penn & Mann’s United Musicians, a collective that “provides marketing, promotion and publicity services for artists, while allowing them to keep ownership of their music.”

From 2002 to 2017, Mann released six more studio albums. With the exception of a 2006 holiday album, the rest have all found their way onto album charts around the world with three reaching the top 40 in the US. In 2013, Mann also began performing alongside Ted Leo in a duo named The Both. “Suicide Is Murder” was released in August 2021 as the lead single for her tenth album Queens of the Summer Hotel.