Aimee Mann has never been afraid of sadness. She’ll tell you straight out: “I like it because, of course, it’s incredibly sad.” That was about Badfinger’s “Name of the Game,” the duet she recorded with Susanna Hoffs. But it could just as well serve as her career thesis statement.
Her record, Queens of the Summer Hotel, was born from a stage adaptation of Girl, Interrupted—Susanna Kaysen’s memoir about psychiatric hospitalization in the late ’60s. Mann was approached years ago to write songs for the production. “Obviously this is really up my alley,” she laughed. “My last record was called Mental Illness. This is kind of my wheelhouse.”
She dove in. “It’s a fun puzzle,” she insists. “You put yourself in the mindset of the character—mostly the narrator, Susanna Kaysen—and think, what’s the music bed that this narrative suggests? What else could I bring to it? I just started writing like a madman. Outstripped the script, actually. I don’t even know if there is a finished script. So I just said, here’s a bunch of music, do whatever you want with it.”
That freedom led to songs that don’t behave like “normal” Aimee Mann songs. Many are barely a minute long. “Sometimes I’d write and go, that’s all this character had to say in this sitting. That’s liberating. You don’t have to worry about pop-song structure. You can stop mid-thought.”
She also ditched her usual guitar for piano. “Harmonically, I could try different things—seventh chords, ninth chords. Stuff I can’t play on guitar, because I’m not a very good guitar player. And I didn’t have to write for my own voice, because someone else might sing them. Which, of course, backfired when I decided to make it a record and realized some of it was way out of my range.”
The sound, too, was guided by the book’s setting. “I wanted it to sound like 1968,” she says. “But not Woodstock rock. More Burt Bacharach, Jimmy Webb, Sinatra. The easy listening that was happening then—bossa nova, swing waltzes. Filtered through me, obviously, because I’m no Burt Bacharach.”
Mann’s dry chuckle cuts through. But she nailed it. Songs like “I See You” feel like they could have floated through a dusty AM radio in ’68, only the subject matter—suicide, dissociation, despair—would have been too raw for prime time.
She talks about “Suicide Is Murder,” which lifts its title and imagery directly from Kaysen’s memoir. “Originally I wrote it kind of tongue-in-cheek, almost like a how-to. Then I got uncomfortable. I’ve known people who’ve committed suicide. It’s devastating—you always blame yourself on some level. I wanted more of myself in that one.”
That’s the paradox: writing for a character but slipping in her own scars. Mann admits she’s lived through dissociation and a nervous-breakdown-era stint in a treatment center 20 years ago. “So I 100 percent understood what that felt like,” she says.
Still, she insists she keeps a singer’s distance. “I want you to listen to the story. I don’t want to sell it by being really emotional. The singer is just the messenger. I’m really into songwriting—that’s the thing I want you to focus on.”
And yet she somehow makes even the most brutal phrases—“premeditated rehearsed tragedy”—catchy. “That was from the book,” she confesses. “I read it and thought, I have to put that to music. The fun is figuring out how to make something that shouldn’t work in a song actually work.”
Is it therapy? Mann hedges. “Songwriting is about describing. And when you tell the truth about something, there’s a chemical reaction in your brain that makes you feel better. The song becomes an analog for what’s going on, and that’s really satisfying. Plus it’s fun when the puzzle is solvable. It’s not fun when you get three clues and you’re stuck.”
The record closes with “In Your Lost,” which Mann envisioned as a kind of benediction. “My idea was that the cast would turn to the audience and talk directly to the people who are struggling, and say: I get it, I see you, I know what that’s like.”
Whether Girl, Interrupted ever makes it to stage is almost beside the point. Mann already turned the fragments into one of her most haunting, liberating records. She may joke about writing “sad” songs, but there’s something bracing in the way she translates dissociation into melody, nervous breakdowns into bossa nova, devastation into puzzle-solving.
“I just want you to listen to the story,” she repeats. And you do—because no one else could make this kind of heaviness sound so precise, so musical, and yes, so strangely fun.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
