Aimee Mann
Lost in Space
(hear it)

Aimee Mann is one of my favorite singers. She places notes, phrases melodies, and enunciates with precise relaxation.

I got this album against the advice of my sister - I would guess she is a pretty good Aimee Mann fan, but I was to choose, at Half Price Books in Madison WI, between this and rather beat up copies of "I'm with Stupid" and "Bacehlor No. 2", and the next day I was to leave the state. I do believe those are a couple of her best albums, and I have some personal acquaintance with "BN2", but what good is a scratch guarantee if I'm 1500 miles away, I ask you. Then I noticed this album was mixed by Michael Brauer.

Our world is increasingly populated by specialists. I am not yet wary of this trend. As long as we regular folk are generally competent, we can contextualize and evaluate the ideas unleashed by the experts, who, truth be told, may not be aware of much outside of their offices, or their cranes, as the case may be. But now then, suppose we all march away from one another into fields of expertise. Can I really trust the expert decider who has no familiarity at all with peanuts to tell me whether I should have spanish or honey-roasted? If I spend all my time writing songs, what insight can I have into presenting them, or into mixing a modern recording's multiple layers of sound into something musical?

In recording, as everywhere else outside of hippie-dom (hippie music is an interesting subject in this regard), specialization is rampant. You might have
a songwriter,
an arranger (ie, "you play this there"),
an arranger for the strings ("please place a note of this sort at this juncture"),
a producer ("could you play this there a little more like this?"),
a tracking engineer ("I didn't get that, could you play it again?"),
a protools engineer for tracking ("click, ctrl-c, click, ctrl-v, don't bother playing it again"),
a mix engineer ("to make the snare cut through I use a JJ99-2 - they made 3, and I modified/broke mine to perfection"),
a protools engineer for mixing ("click, click, click"), and
a mastering engineer ("I used the re-awesomizer for a little extra sparkle")
(note, I think there is actually a digital audio processor called an "awesomizer").

Now add one or two co-whatevers and assistants for each category above. And musicians - don't forget that people have specialized in playing a particular style, on a particular instrument, and even then it might be just the guitar solo...

I never paid much attention to Brauer's work, which includes big albums by Coldplay and John Mayer as well as the classic one-hit by the New Radicals, "You Get What You Give", until he was written about in Tape Op Magazine. There, he describes an approach to mixing which is probably best described as complicated and expensive. He sends all the tracks out from the Protools computer into a fabulously awesome mixing desk, the kind you see in music videos. After applying a pile of electronics to each part to smarten it up a bit, he groups them into say, guitars, drums, background vocals, balalaika orchestra, etc. Then each group gets processed together, which people like to say "glues" them together. He is specifically famous among engineers for mixing some of each group - unprocessed - back into the processed sound, which is really not a bad idea. Then the whole shebang gets mixed to stereo and gets glued again. In a way, this grouping is a specialization of the parts of the music, a declaration of who gets to do what for the glory of song.

I sometimes ascribe all of my uncertainty about specialization to trust issues. If I could engage in an idle back-and-forth now and then, without imagining it into a mental match of ping-pong, perhaps the idea of entrusting my future to someone else would be easier to swallow.

I think Michael Brauer's total awareness of his field has impressed me, because I've been checking out his projects since that Tapeop interview. I have yet to hear something disturbing or hard to like. Even, for example, Aimee Mann's "High on Sunday 51", which features what they call dirty or bluesy guitars and lyrics like "let me be your heroin", comes out pretty chipper, to tell you the truth. A different set of choices could have made it a very hard song to listen to; this set of choices kind of made it seem pointless, or edgeless maybe.

Other than that song, I think Lost in Space has a pack of decent, morose, songs. I want to guess that Mann actually wrote the album in a disturbed frame of mind. I have a hard time understanding what a lot of these songs are about, as if the author was uncomfortable revealing the whole of her meaning. The language itself is direct, often simple, yet the thoughts remain veiled. The quiet songs tend to be more driven by the lyrics, and perhaps that's why I gravitated to the rocking-er "Pavlov's Bell" and "The Moth". Speaking of "Moth", I remember something. Aimee Mann changed the course of my own songwriting - before I ever wrote a song - when she spoke on MTV's 120 Minutes, to paraphrase, "I try never to write songs about the weather or use rain or clear skies as metaphors, it's just so overdone". I think with "The Moth", she has finished off the metaphor of bugs and flames for a good decade or so.

bb, 6 Jan 2008