IT'S been 13 years since Aimee Mann played Sheffield. City-born novelist David Belbin asks why.
SHE'S made three previous visits to Sheffield, but it's been more than a decade since Aimee last parked up.
On the phone from LA, she blames the delay on promoters and looks forward to playing the Leadmill later this month. She's also pretty pumped up about the presidential election.
"Historically I've been politically ignorant but I'm definitely paying attention," she confirms. "Me and my friends are watching everything, every dumb-ass Sarah Palin interview, trying to pass information to each other because we really, really do not want McCain to win."
Aimee's latest album @#%&*! Smilers (no prizes for guessing what @#%&*! replaces) is a steady grower, packed with her classy wry, observational pop songs.
Aimee can be as jaundiced and curmudgeonly as the title, but she also writes moving songs with gorgeous melodies. Surprisingly, Smilers features no electric guitars, but I didn't notice this until she mentioned it. The UK tour will do the same.
"I play acoustic guitar. We have two big keyboard rigs along with the bass and drums. The analogue keyboards take over the electric guitar in a real interesting way on the older stuff."
A lyricist's lyricist, she doesn't start from the words. "The music comes first. Then the music suggests a tone and the tone suggests a story and the story suggests actual words. Occasionally I have a line that comes with the music and I have to ask myself 'hey, what could that possibly mean?' Then I structure it around that."
After an early hit with her second band, Til' Tuesday, Mann had to wait until the turn of the century for public acclaim.
Her songs were used on the Magnolia film soundtrack; Save Me was nominated for an Oscar. Did that make her less cynical about the music business?
"I feel as if I'm not really part of the music business except in a general way. People just don't buy CDs any more and obviously I'm affected by that. It's probably going to get to the point where people buy so few CDs it's not possible to break even. I keep doing what I do and playing shows and enjoying the thing that I do."
Aimee reckons major music companies are starting to go for all-in deals that include merchandising rights, so we're likely to see more manufactured groups like the Spice Girls, with the real money coming from selling clothing rather than music.
Mann's songs are often compared to perfectly formed short stories. Unlike some musos she has no ambitions to write fiction, however.
"People ask me if I ever wanted to write a book. I don't have another lifetime to try and master a form and I don't want to write some crappy thing with lousy prose. I hate reading bad prose. I don't want to be responsible for putting bad prose in the world." What she would like to do is write comics. She loves writer/ artists like Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Charles Burns, Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware.
"It really is all about the writing.
My drawing's not that great but there's a lot of graphic novels I like where the drawing's not that terrific. There's an inherent discipline in laying out the pages visually and it takes a long time to learn what works and what doesn't work.
"I'm not used to writing a long form thing and I'm essentially pretty lazy. I have things started in outline with little thumbnail drawings but I can't really say I'm going to write a book because I know how hugely distracted I am. It's a long term, very loose goal."
Aimee Mann plays the Leadmill on October 23. The Pretender, David Belbin's novel about literary forgery, is published by Five Leaves next month at £8.99.
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