But she still ended up with a release steeped in the aesthetics and values of Largo, a place so hospitable to her sound that Flanagan once jokingly called it “Aimee Mann’s clubhouse.” Out of step though it might have been with a testosterone-damaged late-’90s rock marketplace dominated by Mann’s Interscope labelmates Nine Inch Nails, Limp Bizkit and Marilyn Manson (not to mention a pop sphere populated by and targeted entirely toward teens), the intricately crafted Bachelor No. 2 and demanded, “Aimee doesn’t expect us to put this record out as it is, does she?”Īt various points during the recording process, Mann attempted to churn out the hit that would liberate her other songs from the vaults at Interscope. Mann eventually told van Meter that she’d heard Interscope head Jimmy Iovine had listened to Bachelor No. He assured the Times that not only had he given her specific feedback on choruses that “weren’t working,” he’d also made her a tape of better ones. The lightness of her vocal lends a hint of irony to her scornful lyrics, which offended her A&R rep. “It doesn’t really help that you can never say what you’re looking for/But you’ll know it when you hear it,” she sings. She wrote the deceptively winsome piano ballad “Nothing Is Good Enough” about this exhausting back-and-forth. “It’s also incidentally, their job to come up with a way of selling records if, say, I don’t have a single at all.” “A single is a record company’s job: to pick out a song that they think is good and make sure people hear it,” Mann complained. In 1999, The New York Times Magazine sent reporter Jonathan van Meter to observe her struggle to get her label to release the record over their protests that it lacked a single. 2, Mann was known for clashing with the industry. Her power-pop debut, 1993’s Whatever, and somewhat more muted 1995 follow-up I’m With Stupid proved she was a witty, self-possessed songwriter, even as sales in the low six figures disappointed the suits.īy the time she made her third album, Bachelor No.
At the beginning of that decade, Mann’s band ’Til Tuesday-a new wave act that had peaked with the breathy 1985 hit “ Voices Carry”-broke up, and she launched a solo career. The gimmick-free nature of her music and public image perturbed sexist, unimaginative major-label executives in the ’90s, when the industry was still printing money and every act was expected to break out with the same velocity as Nirvana. All of this made her an outlier in the music industry at large. Over the course of four decades, she has been a pop flavor of the week who reinvented herself as a singer-songwriter a folk-rock traditionalist who refused to posture her way into a self-consciously edgy alternative idiom a woman whose persona isn’t seductive or enraged so much as pensive and, at times, embittered an artist in a youth-obsessed industry who started doing her best work sometime in her late 30s. The traditional narrative around Mann’s career frames her as an aberration. This is the environment that nurtured Mann’s brilliant 2000 album Bachelor No.
Largo became an ersatz salon and fostered some of the greatest collaborations of its time. Music-loving filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Michel Gondry were in the mix, too. Flanagan also filled out bills with pillars of LA’s stand-up scene: Zach Galifianakis, Margaret Cho, Sarah Silverman. Owned by Mark Flanagan, a towering Irishman with discerning taste in music, Largo became a haven for the eclectic, sophisticated pop sound Brion championed, played by performers who’d long ago outgrown open-mic nights.
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