Only Aimee Mann could make a giant concrete orb packed with hundreds of strangers feel intimate. But during her show Monday night at The Egg, Albany’s oddly-shaped performing arts center, the seasoned musician conjured the aura of a very good therapist’s office with a comfortable couch, of earnest 3 a.m. dorm room conversations conducted lying on a pillows on the floor lit by fairy lights (conversations that, in my experience, were usually accompanied by Aimee Mann wafting from a laptop’s speakers like perfume from a lilac bush).
Jonathan Coulton, who composed the viral “Still Alive” from the closing credits of 2007’s Portal, opened with a mostly-solo performance of gently humorous folk songs about dad-aged geek concerns like shop vacs and internet trolls. Aimee Mann joined him briefly for banter and a few songs — the cyberpunk “All This Time” and Star Trek-inspired “Redshirt.” He later returned to Mann’s side for a verse from “Melancholy Melodies,” a Chat GPT-generated title he punched up to tell the tragedy of Aimee Mann’s gluten intolerance. Like the Ikea furniture he sang about at the end of his set, Coulton’s music is efficient and safe. The crowd adored it.
Aimee Mann’s performance, backed by Paul Bryan (bass), Adam Tressler (guitar), Jamie Edwards (keyboards) and John Sands (drums), draws from struggles both acute and chronic. This tour comes at the tail end of a bout of psychosomatic hearing loss that kept Mann from listening to music for a year, and between songs she spoke frankly and briefly of emotional turmoil.
The singer-songwriter kicked off her performance with self-effacing humor, noting that this was the first show of the tour, so “We make a lot of mistakes.” Her opening song, “Summer Lies,” comes from a 2017 studio album titled Mental Illness and captures the disorientation of dealing with a compulsive liar.
Mann played several pieces from her latest collection, Queens of the Summer Hotel, an album she originally crafted for a stage adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted. (The play was canceled due to the pandemic.) “You Fall” explores how thinly the costume of femininity conceals the existential dread lurking underneath — a theme perfectly matched by Mann’s gentle harmonies and mellow retro-’70s instrumentals and soothing voice lilting the lyrics “That’s the last thing holding you in/the universe’s delicate skin.”
Mann traded one of her many guitars for a perch behind the keyboard to croon “Suicide is Murder,” a track somehow equal parts wry and painfully sincere. But this was a place of safety and comfort, and so Mann carefully lifted the audience out of the bleak song with familiar favorite “Save Me.”
After she ended her set with “King of the Jailhouse,” the crowd’s applause pulled her back to the stage for an encore.
“I haven’t been Egged in a long time,” she quipped before digging into beloved waltz “Amateur,” followed by the bouncy “Long Shot,” which brought the audience to a standing ovation.
This is not the howling torment of the young artist. Aimee Mann approaches mental illness with quiet, no-nonsense honesty that still startles with its straightforwardness. Here is the beauty of age and experience, for herself and the many salt-and-pepper heads in the audience: you’ve been there before, and you can look at it with perspective, and you’re in a better place now. Probably.
Next up at the Egg: Melissa Etheridge, Aug. 8.
Where RS Benedict Is Headed Next: The Feels, an opening reception for a group art exhibition at Albany Barn. I’ve been meaning to check out the Barn for a long time now. It’s a creative arts incubator and program space that includes low-cost live-work residences for artists.
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