RENAISSANCE WOMAN
Musician Aimee Mann’s response to pandemic stress revealed a range of hidden talents
The ringing in Aimee Mann’s ears was getting worse. Was this how her musical career might end — not with a bang, but a squeaking sound of distress?
That pandemic stress symptom was dramatized in a comic that the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter painted and then shared in March on Instagram. “My nervous system is so jacked up, it thinks that music at any level is dangerous,” she wrote about her alarming sonic distortion. Her caption attached to the post said simply “Nervous system disorder” and engendered empathy from some of Mann’s many fans.
These grey shades of engaging honesty provided a raw peek into how we could have lost her as working entertainer. Instead, Mann hits the road this spring. She began a tour Apr. 15 in New York. (No Canadian dates have been announced).
This year, Mann the professional rock star has been regularly posting on her Instagram account as an amateur cartoonist, and as a portrait painter of lesser presidents and intriguing first ladies. Some of her comics share subdued reflections; others offer spiky drama, such as when she was bounced from a Steely Dan tour and responded with a provocative comic. Her feed is fascinating enough that within mere months, she has become one of the more revelatory visual artists on social media.
Perhaps this explosion of illustrated expression shouldn’t be so surprising. This, after all, is the sharply witty observer of dysfunction and despair who once penned the lyric “just read the dialogue balloon,” in her 2000 song Red Vines; whose song Ghost World is a direct nod to the Daniel Clowes comic; whose 2002 album Lost in Space featured cover art and a mini-comic by indie Canadian cartoonist Seth; and who counts cartoonists such as Joe Matt among her wide circle of creative friends.
Mann, 61, speaks with a warm ease during a March Zoom call from her home in the Los Angeles area, where she keeps composition notebooks of her new comics, as well as those acrylic-portrait canvases of some first ladies and the “10 worst presidents,” some of which she plans to display at the City Winery in New York, the first stop of her tour.
“What I really should be doing is getting ready for the tour” at the moment, she says with a laugh, instead of: “Let me take on another hobby.”
Yet sharing life events through visual art is more than hobby — it’s therapy.
Mann began the coronavirus lockdown by depicting birds. The artist who two decades ago released the album Bachelor No. 2, or the Last Remains of the Dodo — featuring avian art on the cover — was now inspired by online classes as she rendered a rock wren, a green bee eater and a black-necked stilt.
Mann’s artistic plans next moved toward creating a graphic memoir, but in the summer of 2020, she started to feel ill. Concentrating too long on creating art exacerbated her pain.
The songwriter says a nervous system disorder began triggering a cluster of symptoms. She experienced migraines. She was constantly dizzy and light-sensitive, becoming nauseated when focusing on any type of digital screen. Then there were the hearing problems: “I couldn’t listen to music because it was so distorted.”
The Berklee College of Music alumna who burst onto the national scene in the mid-1980s — when her Mtv-embraced band Til Tuesday charted with Voices Carry — now contemplated whether this was it: “The hearing stuff made me go: Well, I guess my career is over.”
Mann, fortunately, responded well to treatment. She was aided by an app called Curable. She began cognitive behavioural exercises designed for chronic pain and other nervous-system symptoms. And for her, like many others, a crucial aspect of cognitive therapy was chronicling one’s feelings by hand.
At first, attempts to fill pristine journals and crisp Bristol board with fully realized art promoted stress. Then last year, friend and New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake recommended the illustrated manuals of cartoonist and Macarthur “genius” grant winner Lynda Barry.
In mid-january, Mann began sharing her autobiographical comics on Instagram every few days. Each was a quotidian tale in four narrative beats — 90-minute renderings in spare lines, in notebooks that heighten the sense of experiencing someone’s unguarded honesty. The words were economical, but the window into Mann’s world felt expansive.
Mann’s side gigs have included voice acting for animation (Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe, FX’S Dicktown), and appearing on screen (Portlandia, The Big Lebowski). Now, her comics emerge as a new passion — even as her humorous tone and emotional dissonance echo her songwriting voice.
“They feel spontaneous and real,” says Barry herself, noting: “I’ve always thought making comics and songwriting had a lot in common. They both move and loop through a relatively short period of time using images which expand that time.”
Mann says Barry’s art exercises — including making lists that spark creativity — liberated her from becoming stuck, as she realized: “Oh, there’s a way I could draw that doesn’t have to be perfect?” In a career that has stoked high stress and expectations at times, she appreciates this lessening of artistic pressure: “It’s not about looking great. It’s about just filling up a notebook and just getting it done.”
Mann is self-deprecating about her visual art abilities, yet she welcomes the challenge: “It takes practice and a long time to start to learn to speak in that language in a poetic way.” She is also precise in her approach, choosing to paint with a Winsor & Newton University brush because many of her favourite cartoonists favour it.
“The visual thing has a kind of seductive magic to it that unlocks a language — and that’s how I feel about music and I can kind of see it with comics,” Mann says. She has studied the art of turning the humdrum into several resonant beats. “You learn how to make a story out of a really small event.”
She sees creating a short comic as analogous to writing a three-minute song: “Your mind becomes attuned to: What part of this will I sum up in a chorus? What is the counterpoint that I’ll use in the bridge? How do I phrase this?” She keeps her captions short and impactful.
“Mann’s comics are so exciting — loose and intimate, honest, acerbic, and so free,” says Rebecca Sugar, the Steven Universe creator, who collaborated with Mann on the 2019 Steven Universe: The Movie song Drift Away. (Mann also voices the series’ character Opal — a tall, white-maned super-being — in a bit of “dream casting,” Sugar says.)
“I was supposed to open for Steely Dan this summer. I just found out that they took me off the bill” — a March 16 comic
For weeks, Mann’s Instagram comics attracted a steady stream of admiring readers, including such rock-star cartoonists as Roz Chast (“love her music, love her comics,” she says) and Adrian Tomine, who remembers Mann and her husband, musician-producer Michael Penn, attending a Los Angeles bookstore appearance of his about a decade ago.
Mann eased into this positive space, as her comic stories wove from dreams and fears to conversations with fellow celebrities — including the occasional reveal about a song’s lyrical reference. (Who knew that her 2012 song Slip and Roll — which opens with “It went from moon lighting” — was citing a charming encounter with Bruce Willis?)
In March, she shared the comic about being removed from a Steely Dan tour — which she now chalks up to a possible miscommunication among layers of representatives. The resulting speculation over why she was taken off the bill made headlines.
“It’s weird to suddenly lose a gig because you think: Did I do something wrong?” Mann says. Her comic wondered aloud whether Steely Dan’s camp thought she was a wrong fit as a female singer-songwriter — the whiff of rock-world sexism she says she first encountered decades ago. Didn’t their blends of smart, sardonic wit match?
(“I was misinformed as to how firm the commitment was to any particular opening act,” Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen told Rolling Stone in a statement: “And, although I have the greatest respect for Aimee as a writer and performer, I thought it might not be the best matchup in terms of musical style.”)
What most struck Mann was how some reporters gave her comic’s words the weight of a press statement. She says she underestimated their “need for a perceived cat fight.”
She also tweeted that “all was forgiven if Donald just tells me what Brooklyn is about,” referring to the 1972 song off Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill. Fagen responded with an email to Mann, sharing the backstory behind Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me), which spawned warm-hearted followup comics.
Fagen’s email “really made me laugh,” she says, adding: “He just talked to me a lot about what it was like to live in Brooklyn at that time: People in the neighbourhood, the janky diner, his downstairs neighbour.”
Mann’s diary posts also sometimes reveal insights into her own music. In one comic, Mann hears her song Brother’s Keeper while driving and recounts how she had written it about Amy Winehouse — “how people had enabled her drug addiction so the gravy train kept rolling” — before she switches to say: “Today, I kept thinking about Ukraine.”
I couldn’t listen to music because it was so distorted .... The hearing stuff made me go: Well, I guess my career is over.