Aimee Mann
On the Record: Aimee Mann’s Queens of The Summer Hotel
Artist: Aimee Mann Album: Queens of The Summer Hotel Number of tracks: 15 Label: SuperEgo Records Release Date: November 5, 2021 The sun is shining on Aimee Mann. “It is pretty much all the time,” she remarks from her Los Angeles home, during an East Coast monsoon. Consistently lauded as one of the greatest living songwriters, her new album Queens of The Summer Hotel inarguably perpetuates her reputation for uncompromised artistry. Her process for the new album began three years ago when she began writing songs for a stage adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s book Girl, Interrupted, about Kaysen’s stint in a mental hospital. “A different creature” from the stage adaptation, the title Queens of the Summer Hotel takes inspiration from a poem by Anne Sexton, who, ...
Aimee Mann Shares Cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Avalanche’
Aimee Mann’s captivating cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche,” which serves as the theme song for HBO’s true-crime docu-series I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, is now available for download and/or streaming. It’s an especially poignant song placement for Mann, as she was close friends with the late Michelle McNamara, whose tireless research and book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, helped inspire the series — and catch the criminal McNamara coined the Golden State Killer. “My husband, Michael Penn, and I had been close friends with Patton [Oswalt] and Michelle for many years and were very familiar with the ups and downs of her research,” the Academy Award-nominated and Grammy Award-winning artist said in a rele...
The 25 Best Soundtrack Albums of the 1990s
In the 1980s, music and film collided for cross-promotional blockbusters both transcendent (Purple Rain) and transcendently cheesy (Footloose). In the ‘90s, soundtracks continued to sell in the millions, capturing cultural moments like the Seattle grunge of Singles or the Britpop and electronica of Trainspotting. Auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson reached deep into their record collections to set the mood while movies like Above the Rim and Menace II Society pioneered the concept of soundtracks as hip-hop mixtapes. A great soundtrack can propel an unsuccessful single, like Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose,” to the top of the charts, or revive a decades-old hit, like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It can also push a cult singer-songwriter like Elliott Smith or Aimee Mann to an Oscar perf...
