After four decades in the music industry, Aimee Mann has learned to take a punch. Whether dodging left hooks in the boxing ring or pouring her heart out on stage, shepherded by the squared-up pugilist tattoo on her left deltoid, Mann’s strategy for accepting disquieting surprises is to relax into the fact that they are inevitable.
From the formation of ‘Til Tuesday — the pop-rock outfit behind the 1985 smash hit “Voices Carry” — to the genesis of her own label SuperEgo Records, the Berklee College of Music alum’s sport of choice has taught her that the only moment you have is the one you’re presently in.
“If you’re in the ring and get hit, you can’t stop and say, ‘Hey that hurt!’ If you do, you’re going to get hit again. You just get up and keep going,” Mann tells Boulder Weekly. “I apply that to being on stage. The boxing experience helps me say, ‘It’s in the past. Just move on.’”
To that end, Mann suggests we may have more power over our circumstances (or, at least our perception of them) than we readily admit. It makes sense to be stressed about playing a show with a disorganized sound guy and a stage light that burns out minutes before show time, but one could also see it as an exercise in patience — a funny, humbling reminder that things rarely go the way we want them to.
Take a line from the song “Patient Zero” on her 2017 album Mental Illness:, “Life is grand / and wouldn’t you like to have it go as planned?”
‘Stay inside the music’
Mann intends to roll with the punches during her upcoming performance at the Boulder Theater on Nov. 11. After playing so many shows and staying in countless sketchy hotels with her bandmates and touring partner Jonathan Coulton, she says they know how to find their footing, even if a song starts off a little squirrely.
“I like to tell myself to stay inside the music,” she says. “For me, that means allowing myself to go with the musical experience and stop thinking about anything happening outside of it.”
Plenty of distraction can be found outside that experience, as Mann has learned from her many decades on the road.
“There’s some gritty aspects of [touring]. Like, there’s not always a place to shower,” she says. “But it really does make up for that. You get to be with your friends and play music and share in this experience with an audience.
“There’s something nice about having a group where everybody’s on the same page.”
Moving the needle
Known for her songs about lost, unsettled characters whose egos and shortcomings are their greatest hindrances, Mann is no stranger to exploring the contours of depression, anxiety and being your own worst enemy. From her work on the soundtrack to the 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia, to her latest woodwind-laden album Queens of the Summer Hotel — based on the novel Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen — the 64-year-old artist explores themes of codependency, delusion, abandonment and rejection.
Mann says she finds something amusing and relatable about the sad lives and circumstances of the folks in her songs.
“You know, it might ring true, or it’s funny because it’s so terrible, funny because it’s pathetic,” she says. “Even [in] the most grim song I’ve written, there will probably be a handful of lines that I find funny.”
Perhaps it’s the universality of her expressions of brokenness that has kept Mann’s career marching on for the last four decades. That stands true even for “repugnant” president-elect Donald Trump, whose interior life she imagined on the track “Can’t You Tell?” after the 2016 election: “Isn’t anybody going to stop me? / I don’t want this job,” she sings. “Can’t you tell? / I’m unwell.”
“He’s a miserable person looking for outside solutions to internal problems, and I certainly can relate to that,” she told Elle that year. “I know a lot of people who do that.”
But whether it’s an ill-tempered tyrant or a wave of righteous anger in response, Mann’s artistic project is about exploring the root causes of our individual and collective pain.
“People who are broken and acting out are looking to make themselves feel better by stepping on the backs of others,” she says. “But it’s not realistic and it’s not problem-solving. It doesn’t move the needle.”
ON THE BILL: Aimee Mann with Jonathan Coulton. 8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 11, Boulder Theater, 2032 14th St., Boulder. $45+