I just saw one of my musical heroes, Aimee Mann play in Cleveland recently. If you go to a Radiohead show, from what I understand the probability of hearing “Creep” is about as close to zero as you can find in the world. I’ve seen Aimee play a bunch of times, and I’d guess that the frequency of hearing “Voices Carry” was something like 50%, with a lot of irony involved. But at the end of the recent Cleveland show for her final number she defiantly said, “I wrote this song a long time ago and I had to miss the Women’s March so I’m going to play this.” The song was indeed “Voices Carry.”
It’s always been a weird thing to think of people as talented as Aimee as “One Hit Wonders.” Today’s charts are so weird that the concept doesn’t have the same stigma. Aimee’s husband Michael Penn is also referred to as a “One Hit Wonder” after his monster smash “No Myth.” Technically, if you look at the charts Led Zeppelin was a “One Hit Wonder” and the Who never really had a hit. “I Can See for Miles” made it to number 9 and Pete Townshend felt it was his biggest career disappointment.
There’s no coincidence involved that in the movie “That Thing You Do” the band was called the Wonders and only had one hit. The sad part of it was that the reason they only had one hit was that their manager, played by Tom Hanks, only perceived them that way. It’s also no coincidence that the title song was sung by a guy with no hits, Mike Viola of the Candy Butchers, and written by another “One Hit Wonder” Adam Schlesinger of the band Fountains of Wayne, who should have tons of hits other than “Stacy’s Mom.”
I remember the “Voices Carry” video very well, it and MTV was a big part of its success. The things that hit me at the time were that the lead singer was beautiful, had a really cool punk haircut, was a lead singer who somehow played bass, led an otherwise all male band and had an incredible dick as a boyfriend. The ending where Aimee sings out in the opera (beautifully) was extremely dramatic and looking back now in as much pain as John Lennon anywhere on his first solo album.
But pop is pop and I forgot about it until I accidentally saw the wonderful video for Aimee’s “I Should Have Known…” For record label reasons and spectacularly incompetent promotion the incredibly cool and clever video (Love the “dot dot dot” references to an ellipse) probably only played on MTV like three times. It should have been a massive hit. The rhythmic lead guitar by Jon Brion is as ferocious as anything Pete Townshend has ever played and yet melodically it is up to par with the Beatles. It’s sort of a brave announcement that she is over the guy from “Voices Carry” and determined to go on despite the pain she still has.
And always isn’t always
When it’s not your photograph that I’ve been keeping
But you still live in those days
When I’d stay awake just to watch you sleeping
You delivered that blow
But it left a mark on me that you’re not seeing
And I don’t know what else you hear
But it’s not me weeping
After loving the video I saw two mentions about Aimee’s first solo album Whatever. First Entertainment Weekly talked about how great it was and that the second ‘Til Tuesday album had shown great growth and that this was proof of an artist improving and coming into their own.
Then I saw some form of this:
Elvis Costello is known for being stingy with his praise and liberal with his criticism. So when he chooses to champion a fellow singer-songwriter, it attracts attention.
This year he sang the praises of Aimee Mann in the English music press, saying he wished he’d written these opening lines to one of her recent songs: “Today’s the Fourth of July / Another June has gone by / And when they light up our town I just think what a waste of gunpowder and sky.”
“He’s very opinionated,” notes a grateful Mann of Costello. “Woe unto those who get on the wrong side of his criticism. I’m glad to be on the correct side.”
I bought Whatever, and it’s definitely a break up record and coincidentally I had just gone through the worst break up of my life. I listened to it maybe 5000 times and I’m not exaggerating. On the upbeat side, my favorite song on the album was called “Mr. Harris” about a young woman who falls in love with an older man, which contains one of my favorite optimistic passages ever.
And honestly
I might be stupid to think
Love is love, but I do
And you’ve waited so long
And I’ve waited long enough for you
Because of record company issues the album wasn’t the huge sensation that it should have been and sadly the exact same thing happened to its equally good follow up I’m With Stupid. The wonderful “That’s Just What You Are” had some modest radio success, but sadly was always just referred to as a cut from the “Melrose Place” soundtrack.
Totally undeserved, “Voices Carry” seemed to become an anchor on Aimee’s career, she had been frozen into time with the haircut from the video and no one thought about her much.
Nevertheless, I was still a rabid fan and frustrated that maybe she wouldn’t get another chance. I bought an EP preview of her third album Bachelor #2 at a show and played it to death, while Aimee seemed to be stuck in a mire.
I think that two things happened at that point that saved her career. The most important long term was that she decided to start her own label and embrace the underground DIY ethos, and stop looking for a record company to handle and promote her intelligently. Unlike the plea of a soon to be great song – she decided to “save herself.”
In the early days of the internet, I sent her an E-mail telling her that I’d love to be her manager because I would treat it as a “holy mission” and she responded “I hope you have experience, like with the Crusades.” I treasured that response.
The second and more important thing short term was that Paul Thomas Anderson, who had worked with her future husband Michael Penn, and the producer, the multi-instrumentalist, and co-writer of Aimee’s first two albums, Jon Brion, fell in love with the Bachelor #2 material and structured his next movie “Magnolia” entirely around her songs, with at one point all of the characters mouthing the words to one of Aimee’s songs “Wise Up.”
It wasn’t as big a hit as it was a respected cinephile treat even with Tom Cruise in it, but Aimee was nominated for best song at the Academy Awards for the wonderful “Save Me.”
It had huge competition that year from the genius “South Park” movie song “Blame Canada,” but of course somehow Phil Collins won for “God Only Knows” what.
Nevertheless, Magnolia transformed Aimee from a “One Hit Wonder” to “critically acclaimed independent artist” and she has spent the last close to 20 years putting out wonderful music with complex themes.
She would never rake in Spice Girls money, but it didn’t seem like she wanted to try anymore. She was still beautiful, but played it down often wearing glasses on stage. I still think that those first two solo albums should have been as commercially gold as anything ever released by anyone male or female. She’s still statistically a “One Hit Wonder,” but in the same class of say if you called Einstein that for coming up with E=MC squared. I have no idea whether she has as much rock star riches as she has respect, but with what must have been an amazing amount of hard work her career has probably turned out to be incredibly rewarding and significant.
So what about “Voices Carry”?
Like “Creep” it was probably something that Aimee didn’t even think that much about. She does have a sense of humor though. Realizing that she was uncomfortable with stage patter she and Michael Penn went on tour with some of her comedian friends from Largo so the pros could tell jokes in between theit brilliant songs.
At one point, I heard a live version of “Voices Carry,” with a comedian imitating the over the top dialogue of actor Cully Holland from the huge video to big laughs.
“I’m so happy the band’s doing well, by the way what’s with the hair?”
“Why can’t you for once do something for me?”
Similarly, I’ve heard a live version of Penn’s “No Myth” sung with Aimee which ended with her doing a hilarious Katherine Hepburn impersonation at the end. They weren’t really “One Hit Wonders” they were just great artists that had happened to have had one big hit.
To further the fun, in 2012 Aimee made a video for her single “Labrador,” as a tongue in cheek reshoot of the “Voices Carry” video, where the new boy friend seems to actually prefer the old hairdo.
All good fun, but then Harvey Weinstein happened and in the shadow of the #metoo movement, “Voices Carry” and even its perhaps over the top seeming video sounded and looked different.
Again you have a strong woman, with an awesome hairdo playing the bass and leading a band, but that boyfriend didn’t seem so absurd anymore, and you had to go back and listen to the lyrics again.
I try so hard not to get upset
Because I know all the trouble I’ll get
Oh, he tells me tears are something to hide
And something to fear
And I try so hard to keep it inside
So no one can hear
Back in the day, I’d only thought that the boyfriend was a huge dick and that she’d leave him, become a rock star, and forget him, but then I had to think more.
Why was she staying with him in the video?
His words were definitely abusive, but did that mean that there was violence or worse that wasn’t being shown?
Is she singing or crying?
Wait he’s wearing a “wife beater” and attacks her, I don’t remember that!
Is he cheating on her or is that her with her old hairdo? I don’t remember that either!
If you look at the famous painting “The Scream,”
it isn’t the scream that is the gut punch. It is the people in the background who don’t seem to notice or care.
So the ending of the video “Voices Carry,” which should have been people genuinely concerned about why this woman was losing it at Carnegie Hall, was tragically ignored as just a crazy woman making an embarrassing scene at the opera or something. It’s an incredibly painful sequence that takes over a minute to resolve and it’s all brought on by his subtle disapproval of her braided hair that represents her musical ambitions.
She finally tears off her hat revealing her hairdo defiantly, but crying “he said shut up!” and ending on a less than triumphant barely heard “I wish he would let me talk”
Did he get her to quit the band and marry her? Did he take her home and light into her with words or worse? No one ever really thought about it back in the ’80s. Just a tuneful song with a eruptive crescendo to both video and song with a pretty girl in it. Everyone took the ending of the video to mean that she’d decided to just kick him to the curb, but the ending of the song isn’t triumphant, it’s tragically sad. “I wish he would let me talk.”
Pop music even the big hits get consumed and forgotten about so easily, but the permanence of video and recording means that it is always there to be rediscovered or reevaluated.
Now “Voices Carry” has a relevance that maybe even Aimee herself had forced herself to forget about. Suddenly 33 years later, it’s a perfect anthem for a generation of women who have been told to keep quiet and not talk out.
No one can be happy about the behavior that led to this song or video, but it’s no longer an anchor on her career, but a gunshot announcing a brave and triumphant one.
Thanks
So insightful!