Release Date: 03 May, 2005
Audio CD
Tracks
- Dear John
- King of the Jailhouse
- Goodbye Caroline
- Going Through the Motions
- I Can't Get My Head Around It
- She Really Wants You
- Video
- Little Bombs
- That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart
- I Can't Help You Anymore
- I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up for Christmas
- Beautiful
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Rating 4.5
Rated Q for qualityAimee Mann's songs have always had a literally cinematic sweeping quality about them. This is why she was so successful on the Magnolia soundtrack and why some of those songs spilled over onto "Bachelor No.1". After retreating back to more confederate song cycle with 2002's "Lost In Space", it's no surprise she's returned to greener pastures with "The Forgotten Arm." With this she's made a soundtrack with the story contained within it, meaning you have to actually jump into the songs to fully grasp and enjoy the story. Not that this kind of ambitious thing hasn't been attempted before, it has in various forms numbers of times, but Aimee Mann does bring something special to the songs that only she could. The story of love and loss presented here is melancholic and unfolding in a predicable way. But the songs work well enough, and are good enough to make you root for the actors the whole way through. The music around each story is tailor made to fit it like a cool breeze fits comfort in the summer. While cavalier listeners may peg each song as folding into another like an adult contemporary radio station, like Sarah Harmer, you have to listen, the gems are in the details. From the perfect page 1 of "Dear John" to the tremlo laced and beautiful "Video" to the "Another Lonely Chrismas"-esque (Prince) "I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas", these songs not only work well enough together to tell a story, but individually they make perfect music for thirty-somethings......and twenty-somethings who really have it together.
STANDOUT TRACKS: 01- DEAR JOHN, 03- GOODBYE CAROLINE, 07- VIDEO, 11- I WAS THINKING I COULD CLEAN UP FOR CHRISTMASThis music makes more sense than the wordsI admire the musicianship that ties these songs together. I don't think that I need to know a story to hear these songs right. I started hearing some of these songs in February on the DVD that was released after the album had been recorded. Another song, "She Really Needs You," was available as a free music download at Amazon.com on the page for "The Forgotten Arm" before the CD release. Due to the small number of songs I download, my computer was inclined to repeat "She Really Needs You" whenever I was playing songs from my hard drive for weeks, and it seemed like the perfect preparation for the album, as stated in Chapter Nine, "That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart." The rhymes tend to be simple:
And though the exit is crude
it saves me coming unglued
for when you're not in the mood
for the gloves and the canvas floor.
That's how I knew this story would break my heart ... when you wrote it.
Such music clings to the logic that continues in Chapter Ten, "I Can't Help You Anymore." After singing a few hopeless laments, Chapter Eleven, "I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up for Christmas," gets a jaunty ragtime piano feel for the start, rocks with it for a chorus, dances around "the business of the prodigal son" and jumps onto some rhymes:
Because I can't live loaded and I can't live sober,
And I've been this way since the end of October,
and I know enough to know: that baby, when it's over, it's over.
And it's over. Because, baby, I'm done.
The final verse has "And that, once upon a time, I believed it was a victimless crime" after "Tell you I'm sorry that I made you a witness to my moral decay."
Chapter Twelve strikes me as being ironic. "Beautiful." There is a bit of "I'm dazzled by the view" and "I'm completely powerless" at the end. The first line, "You pulled up and parked your El Dorado" could be typical of a culture that I hardly take part in anymore. There might be an underwear line:
And we stayed in our Calvins,
and we swore we'd be best friends,
and I looked through the zoom lens,
and thought you were beautiful....
sometimes it hurts me to feel so much tenderness.
There might be some nice healthy relationships somewhere that keep people from participating in this kind of pathos, but artistic sensibility seems to be drawn toward emotional vulnerability that pours out of some situations that music seems to add meaning to as much as anything else could. Listening to this music ought to be evaluated as a learning curve, and the people who get the most out of it will probably listen the most. Some songs can be heard so often that people don't really listen to them anymore, but songs might also be waiting for some moment when they can be heard in a new way and surprise everybody. And there might be words in "She Really Wants You" that you did not hear the first time it played:
Because the stray that you found
that looked so cute at the pound
now has you putting her down as rabid.
If it was badder than bad;
well, then -- you ought to be glad
you can break it like another habit.Check it outAimee Mann has always been a treasure to Los Angeles. She used to play a lot at Cafe Largo. She has made distinct music. Her songs became more known around the time of the Magnolia film. Unfortunately her connection to film didn't really bring her a bigger audience as it did to Elliott Smith, who was in a similar situation. Aimee Mann has always made music that is literary and emotional. This time she has written a whole album with characters and moods. The Forgotten Arm is like a little novella. This album sounds like it was recorded in one take. Songs like "Goodbye Caroline" have a good interplay between vocals and guitar. Apparently Aimee Mann wrote much of these songs on piano. The Beatles and Velvet Underground influence her the most on this album. These are quality tunes. |
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