Whether reminding us that “Voices Carry” with her ’80s pop band ’Til Tuesday or raging against the industry’s starmaker machinery as a solo artist, Aimee Mann has emerged as one of the finest songwriters of her generation. Her fifth solo album, The Forgotten Arm (SuperEgo), finds her treading conceptual turf, weaving the tale of a boxer’s life into the tragedy of a love turned sour.

What led you to even want to make a concept album about a boxer?
First of all, when I started writing songs after I got off tour for (2002’s) Lost In Space, I was writing songs and thinking about the next record. One of the themes that kept coming up for me—because I was dealing with it directly in my life—was the idea of drug addiction, and being involved at some level with people who are drug addicts, or attempting to have relationships with alcoholics or drug addicts. So I started to go to Al-anon meetings because my other recovery friends would recommend it: “You should try this 12-step program, it’s helpful for people who are dealing with alcoholics or addicts.” Then I started making more friends who had an alcoholic mother, or an addict father, and it became a bigger and bigger part of my life, like a scene that kept growing. So it was there from the first songs I wrote, but then I was halfway through the record with a pretty solidified theme. “King Of The Jailhouse” was specifically about two people who had run away together, dysfunctional in their own way, and I got such a visual picture. And so then I thought, “Why not make these characters real characters, give them names and invent kind of a past for them, describe the relationship within the confines of that?”

If I’d been on a major label, the idea would have never gotten to that point, because you just kind of know that they’d give you such a hard time. Like hey, at least we have Starbucks to sell to, but before it would have been, “That won’t sell at Wal-Mart.” Also, the year before, there was a record that our offshoot—this cooperative organization called United Musicians, which allows people like me to put out their own records—we helped this band called the Honeydogs, from Minneapolis, to put out this album called 10,000 Years, which was a concept album, my favorite record of that year. I felt like the songs were so great that it didn’t really matter if you knew what the concept was or not, but the fact that there was an idea or a kind of a story behind it—and it’s still not clear, or that essential to my enjoyment of it—but the fact that the writer cared enough about it to write more than one song about it, and that it had meaning from beginning to end. A record that was infused with meaning to him, in this day and age, it’s refreshing not to have a “singles only,” disposable pop song, “yeah I threw some piece of shit together on the computer, had someone sing on it and autotune their vocals so it doesn’t even sound like a person.” Everyone’s just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it’s a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.

I just got back from the EMP Pop Conference in Seattle. It’s an interesting commingling of academicians and dilettante/hack writers like me. One guy on the first night’s panel submitted a paper where he made the case that as silicon-chip technology improves, these will eventually be implanted in musicians and then the music industry’s dream of having an “artist-less” farm system of talent will be complete. [laughs]
There’s a lot of music that sounds like it’s literally computer-generated, totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument. It’s funny, because every time I have this conversation, you feel like one of those people at the turn of the century chasing after the car, yelling, “Get a horse!” [laughs]

We’re all a bunch of Luddites, I guess.
But people yearn after this robotic dream, but you can’t strip your life of all meaning, emotion and feeling and expect to function.

The irony to all of this is that I went back and listened to some concept albums by people like Kraftwerk, the Residents, even Radiohead, which are made with electronic sounds or try on various robotic guises, but these all turned out to have very human aspects to them.
Yeah! Like Kraftwerk, that was so experimental, weird and strange. Yet you still felt the workings of unusual minds behind it. You could feel the brainpower. You certainly got a feeling from it.

It doesn’t seem accidental that you chose Joe Henry to work with as a producer. He writes in a very cinematic way, very broadscreen. Was this a deliberate choice on your part, knowing the material you were bringing in for this record?
I think that I was reasonably influenced by him. I never go out, but over the past year or so, I’d see him at this little club called Largo. I went to see him two or three times. The quality of his songs, people always reference short stories. He’s more like “short sounds” or even scenes from a movie; he’s telling a very specific story with specific characters. For me, there’s a fine line between telling a story that’s fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it’s bloodless, a little too fictional. The characters are in service of all the people I know now, this composite couple, and they provide a way to tell my stories but through other people.