I’ve waited five long years since the last solo Aimee Mann album. She released an album with Ted Leo in 2014 under the moniker The Both, which was fine, but not the same. I’m stoked.
Even better, Mann told Rolling Stone that the new record, titled Mental Illness, promises to be her “saddest, slowest, most acoustic, if-they’re-all-waltzes-so-be-it-record.” That, my friends, is melancholy music to my ears.
Lead-off single and opening track ‘Goose Snow Cone’ definitely lives up to that description. It’s delicate, finger-picked and sadly beautiful — everything I look for in an Aimee Mann song.
Mental Illness is due out on March 31.
Lookin’ into the face of the goose snow cone
Should be shaking it loose but you do it alone
Every look is a truce and it’s written in stone
[Chorus]
Gotta keep it together when your friends come by
Always checking the weather but they wanna know why
Even birds of a feather find it hard to fly
[Verse 2]
Thought I saw at my feet an origami crow
It was only the street hidden under the snow
Always snatching defeat, it’s the devil I know
[Chorus]
Gotta keep it together when your friends come by
Always checking the weather but they wanna know why
Even birds of a feather find it hard to fly
[Verse 3]
Lookin’ into the face of the goose snow cone
I could pick up the pace but I couldn’t go on
I just wanted a place but I ended up gone
[Chorus]
Gotta keep it together when your friends come by
Always checking the weather but they wanna know why
Even birds of a feather find it hard to fly
[Outro]
Lookin’ into the face of the goose snow cone
Meet Me In Montauk 
Beautiful song, and I’m sure the album will be more of the same, which is a mixed compliment as my knock against Mann is that all her songs sound similar to me. It’s a criticism you have leveled against others from Tracy Chapman to Jack Johnson, but not against Mann. I guess you can never get enough melancholy! 😄
I think when you know an artist very well you see the nuances in his or her music that might not be apparent to a casual fan. So I can point to Mann’s shifting between piano, acoustic and electric guitar on various albums, or the fact that her earliest records were much more pop-focused, but an outsider wouldn’t know that. I’m sure Jack Johnson and Tracy Chapman fans could say the same thing.