Aimee Mann has come a long way from her new wave hair days with ‘Til Tuesday and their monster 80s hit, "Voices Carry." Here in the 21st century you’ll find that while she’s a lot less angry, she more than makes up for it in sadness. The reviews for her new album (what exactly do you call it, by the way?) are overwhelmingly positive and why not? Her voice is both completely natural and unnervingly dispassionate, much like Karen Carpenter’s, the 70s vocalist she’s been compared to more than once in her solo career.

Anyone familiar with Mann’s deceptively lightweight sounds on "Bachelor No. 2" and "Lost in Space" will appreciate how the title @#%&*! Smilers is a sly wink at those who dare to question her never-ending parade of somber songs. On the most haunting of the tracks, "True Believer," you can’t help but wonder if emotional heartache is best served by detachment until it hits you that detachment IS the price you pay for a broken heart. My favorite verse goes: "really when you come into the room it’s not helping me"…that hits a little too close to how it feels when you’re trying to get over someone and you thought you’d never have to see them again, but then you do. Love’s really all just a complicated mess sometimes, isn’t it?

On another stand-out, "Looking for Nothing", Mann sings with swaggering indifference:

Oh I’m not looking for nothing
Just spend my money and go
I’m not looking for nothing
To put me in the rodeo

And on "31 Today," where the singer wonders what has happened to her life, the apathy continues with lines like "taking shelter in the black cocoon" and the more tell-tale "I pretended that I felt a spark." It may cross your mind that’s it’s just too bleak to listen to an album so jaded by someone so young, but the beauty and peace of Mann’s music is well worth soaking in the sorrow. The album closes on a relatively (and I stress relatively!) upbeat note with the slightly cute "Ballentines." It sounds a little Beatlesque – think "When I’m 64" – but even a faster beat can’t turn a frown upside down.

Because I'm a sucker for almost any bad movie (whether original, straight-to-dvd or theatrical release) that ever airs on SyFy (oooh, the new name STILL makes me shudder in slight pain) I wasn't expecting "The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations" to be any good...

but it is...or at least it's good enough to not make you roll your eyes or laugh in inappropriate places. Rachel Miner takes a fairly decent stab at playing the shut-in sister of Sam, an amiable loner-type who gives the local police important leads on various crimes by traveling through time and "observing" the past...though he tells the cops he's "psychic" since that's FAR more believable than jumping through time:)...

The violence is often far too garish (but what else can you expect in a serial killer slasher that borrows the concept, but not the story lines, from the previous two Butterfly Effects) and some of the twists you can see coming a mile away...nevertheless there was something about "The Butteryfly Effect 3" that made it hard for me to stop watching...of course, you can say the same thing about traffic accidents and train wrecks so don't go by me.

...underneath the beautiful and innocent sounds of every almost every song on this album is a lot of darkness. Of course, with an album that covers everything from suicide to rape to drug overdoses that continually put the singer's (on the sweet and sorrowful "Last Dance") loved one in the ICU, you'd have to sugarcoat things a little, right?

I shouldn't find this cd so oddly comforting, but I do...maybe it's like my thing with zombie flicks and disaster movies and sad songs...where it's only when you can't fall any farther, that you finally can start to relax and think about getting back up...

"In and Out of Control" is aptly titled and most certainly one of the best listens of 2009!!

I was walking down the hall after taking my trash to the closet bin for our floor and this unexpected memory popped into my head for no reason whatsover..."Jenny" from a temp place I worked in the early 90s...I had the biggest crush on her...she looked like Kyra Sedgwick (though I didn't know that back then) and was so funny and nice and had a wonderful laugh and big teeth...she had a boyfriend named M.(who looked like a football player and had a goofy, but sweet grin) so I knew my crush was perfectly safe and non-productive, but I still felt guilty.

One day I was covering for her at the reception desk while she took her lunch break...I was manning the phones and it was quiet and I was taping my pencil to the beat of a song I was hearing only in my head. All of sudden the headset lifted off of my ears and I heard her wonderful laugh and she said, "I don't hear any music. What ARE you listening to?" She smiled at me and I knew (knew, obviously!) that it was completely platonic and benevolent and somewhat absent-minded...she was so happy that summer because they were getting engaged...but my heart (I remember this SO clearly now!) did all these amazing flip flops and I just about melted and I just know there was this huge silly look on my face...gosh, I had completely forgotten about that moment until just now...about her in general, even though she was definitely the brightest spot of an otherwise horrendous summer ('91)...that one moment is probably one of the clearest, most unique memories in what is one of the weirdest catalogues of crush memories ever...in an odd way, happier and brighter than any of my other memories...how odd...wonder if that will flash before my eyes when i die...how odd that i remember that now...

...somehow that crush always gets lost in the shuffle when I think back on my big crushes...even "A" gets lost (two years later after that!) and we actually went out on a "date" to the symphony...it was an unintentional one and i think she realized when we bumped heads that night and looked at me funny and completely freaked...she was never the same to me after that night...of course buying her flowers when it was her birthday that time probably didn't help either...what a geek i am when i'm crushing...still neither of those were as bad as my fiasco in high school...the only time i ever went so overboard as to never be capable of being forgiven...

"Crush"...it sounds like such an innocent word and most of the time it is...but sometimes it takes on the weight of what it sounds like the more you repeat the word..."crush"...as in, "crushed" under a grand piano or a giant boulder.

...what a decade for music...



One website magazine called the 00s "the naughties" (at times, it was)...Time magazine called it the "decade from Hell" (sometimes,), but one thing it wasn't was boring...

Each year from the past ten years is etched in my brain more distinctly than each one from any other decade I've lived and though I think I liked the 90s better (surely it wasn't as contentious as this one has been!) and liked the 80s far, far less (please, I hope when we die and discover our Fate, Hell isn't the 80s and Buster Poindexter isn't there singing "Hot, Hot, Hot"!!) I finally found out what it meant to truly enjoy other people and love working and thriving.

On a universal level...I found this to be the best decade ever (in my personal lifetime, at least!) for music...I fell so hard for music, discovered how much it could heal a person, make her think and feel more clearly than ever before...

Lots of much more qualified people and my favorite British music magazines do "best of" lists and after a while the lists all blur together and don't mean so much, especially (!!) if they're not YOURS ('cause YOUR list IS yours, after all!), but still, I (humbly) hope it's okay if I do share my favorites from the past ten years...(in no particular order!)

A lot of the music I discovered through magazines like Paste and Uncut and also through tv shows like "Grey's Anatomy" and "Ugly Betty," which aren't as good as when they first started airing, but still feature awesome singers and musicians.



--"Look What You've Done To Me" by Iko--such a beautiful and absolutely devastating song, only rivaled in exquisite sadness by Gary Jules' "Mad World." (from the mind-boggling film "Donnie Darko.")

--"Dream" by Priscilla Ahn--such a sweet and innocent song...I'm not a very religious person at all, but I always feel so spiritual after hearing this...Ahn is just a lovely, lovely singer...her album "A Good Day" is breath-taking and magical with such an intimate feel to it, like she's right there!!

--"Someone Great" by LCD Soundsystem...the words are amazing and capture grief better than anything I've heard in...well...ever! ("The worst is all the lovely weather/I'm sad, it's not raining./The coffee's not ever bitter/because, what's the difference?") If you get a chance to listen or already know this one and you've lost someone dear, you'll probably be all-too-familiar with its surreal sense of loss and disbelief.

--"That's Me Trying" by William Shatner (not kidding!) I think my favorite Wise Ass is trying to be funny here, but underneath it all (and backed by the awesome Aimee Mann and Ben Folds) is a despair and regret you can't believe Shatner is a part of...

--"Cologne" by Ben Folds...the first time I heard this song I was totally caught off guard by how much I wanted to cry listening to it...it is both full of despair at a broken relationship ("And now I'm wondering why the floor has suddenly become a moving target") and desperately hopeful to move on ("I'm letting you go/I will let go,If you will let go")

--"Lullaby" by the Dixie Chicks...heard this for the first time on my favorite episode of "Medium" ("Twice Upon a Time") and it fit so perfectly with the scene!...In the scene it goes with the main character (Alison Dubois played by Patricia Arquette) is resting on a beautiful field of green grass and dreaming...she soon finds out what it would have been like if she had never married her husband and how sad and empty her life would have been with any other man...I tear up every time I hear this song...and the episode is all the better for having this track play in the beginning and when she realizes the man she DID marry was always her destiny...gorgeous, gorgeous song!!!)

--"Anything I'm Not" by Lenka...she sounds like Ingrid Michaelson (who got her big break through being featured on "Grey's Anatomy") but she sounds even more vulnerable and sings about serious things in a light-hearted manner...this is all about being yourself and yet wanting to be someone else completely...

--"The Trapeze Singer" by Iron and Wine...previously mentioned this one, I know!:)...oh, it's SO not fair how absolutely fragile and stunning their music is...undoes me EVERY time!!

to be continued, with dates added...plus my favorite HAPPY!!! songs