Smiling Isn’t So Bad

If you're annoyed by those relentlessly happy people who put smiley faces in e-mails, Aimee Mann's new album is for you: "@#%&! Smilers!" With its scheduled June 3 release, Mann seems to be suggesting that we all take her music a little less seriously from now on.

Despite her Grammy-winning couplets about missed opportunities and wayward souls, Mann is not one of the desperate characters in her songs. Somewhere between 1999's "Magnolia" soundtrack and her 2005 concept album, "The Forgotten Arm," Mann's cool factor tripled, catapulting her from mere champion of the indie music spirit to the embodiment of modern literate songwriting.

Perhaps "Forgotten Arm"'s story about an alcoholic Vietnam vet and his "kind of white trash" girlfriend proved too dramatic for critics and fans alike, or maybe the ensuing hoopla about her finely crafted verse threatened to overshadow the importance of her melodic gifts. Either way, "Smilers" is set to bring about a sea change in Mann's continuum. Her words have once again met their match in a collection of tunes filled with chewy hooks, buffered by what feels like a newfound optimism.

"Freeway," the album's groovy midtempo opener, is a yarn about a Southern California druggie who cruises I-5 to feed his addiction. In typical Mann fashion, a happy-go-lucky major-key refrain disguises dark subject matter. "You got a lot of money, but you can't afford the freeway," she sings over a distorted Wurlitzer organ riff. The chorus is so catchy the listener holds out hope that this addict will eventually get his act together.

Mann tells NEWSWEEK the song was inspired by a friend with a nasty amphetamine habit and a fat wallet. "In this case, [he] was living in Los Angeles, going down to Orange County and talking doctors into prescribing him speed, because he was charming and had money. It's well and good to have a lot of money, but you can't really afford to have that much money, because it enables you to slowly kill yourself." Full of the interwoven stories and jaunty musical arrangements that have become her trademark, "Freeway" is one of the many character studies that makes Mann's seventh solo album such a welcome return to form.

The new songs, which run the gamut from an acoustic personality storm ("Little Tornado") and a slow-dance séance ("True Believer," written with Grant-Lee Phillips) to a cautionary fairy tale with a full horn section ("Borrowing Time"), were recorded live in the studio, without any electric guitars. "Musically, it's very rich," Mann says of the album's array of vintage organ, synthesizer and clavinet sounds. "The keyboards really rule the day. They take over the job of the electric guitar, and there sort of wasn't any need for it. It became redundant and was relegated to the closet."