J like Aimee Mann before I did. Oh, I liked the 'Til Tuesday hit, "Voices Carry," but not enough to buy the album,, whereas J not only bought that one but a few other 'Til Tuesday albums as well as the first Mann solo album. I listened to them a bit, but nothing quite caught me, even though "(Believed You Were) Lucky" was quickly added to my favorite singles. That was until Lost in Space forced me to re-evaluate her entire output. I didn't immediately like Lost in Space, either, but for some reason I kept being drawn back to it until I had it on some serious repeat play. I then started working backwards through her ouvre, starting with Bachelor No. 2 all the way through 'Til Tuesday.

The seeds of Lost in Space are all here in Bachelor No. 2: the otherworldly background sounds that fill in the silences, the echoing production on the guitars, the vocals up front in the mix, and the obscure lyrics that slowly begin to make sense about the fourth or fifth time you've paid attention to them. The speed of all the songs seem to be pegged around 90 or 100 beats per minute, which ain't very fast, and the overall sound is pretty laid back, but that's the surface, because where the songs are dynamic is in the layers of sound that come and go. Most songs start with just one instrument and the vocal, slowly building by adding drums or guitar or background vocals until the chorus arrives and you realize that there's a whole band playing. This increase in power underscores the choruses of the song, and that's where Mann shines. It's not that her lyrics and melodies for verses are that bad, but she's got a knack for choruses that are insidious in how they can get into your subconscious.

Mann tends to write lyrics that refer to a second party directly. That is, most of her lyrics refer to "you," which is never actually you the listener of the song, but some specific you that the protagonist of the song has a problem with. The best example of this is the song "Deathly," which starts "Now that I've met you / would you object to / never seeing each other again / 'Cause I can't afford to / climb aboard you / no one's got that much ego to spend."

Much of the music on this album was written for or inspired by a movie. "Deathly," for example, was written for "Magnolia" (the soundtrack of which has slightly different versions of some of these songs; Paul Thomas Anderson based his script around Mann's music, which I think came first, but obviously there was some kind of exchange between the two of them) while "Ghost World" was either written based on Clowes' graphic novel or the movie based on the same. And when you start listening to all the songs as more "lyrical stories," you start connecting to them better, even if most songs seem to be variations between the same couple (the singing protagonist and the anonymous "you" that she is singing to). While I do have favorites here that come close to my feeling for the songs in Lost in Space, I tend to fixate on certain sections of songs here, typically the choruses, instead of the entire song. For example, it's the chorus of "Calling It Quits" with its background horns that I find myself humming the next day after I've listened to the song, or the chorus of "Driving Sideways" which propels itself between the 1-3 beat and the background singers that repeat the title.

This is as much an introspective record as Lost in Space, and rewards active listening rather than putting it on in the background, because Mann's talent lies in how she is able to create a mood and story given such few words. As you move further back into her catalog, all the way back to "Voices Carry," you can see how she's honed this skill, so it was unsurprising to me that her follow-up to Lost in Space was a concept story album called The Forgotten Arm. Everything she's done led up to it, but it was likely Anderson and this album that shifted her from using a simple single for each song to an entire song-cycle.