I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #5:
Swan song and springboard, 1988's Everything’s Different Now was the third and last 'Til Tuesday album for a group who couldn’t match the commercial success of their first hit single and album, Voices Carry, three years earlier. At the same time, Everything also showcased just how far Aimee Mann, digging in her heels at joining in on the formulaic ’80s synth-pop parade passing by and into oblivion, had come in the development of her ever-promising songwriting craft. It comprised a trajectory that would take her to points beyond with her rewarding solo career - marked by impeccable, precise lyrical richness and with a harder-edged and alternately infectious and starkly dark melodic sensibility.
The strength of Everything lies in its melancholy and pointed, bittersweet poignancy. The title song perfectly encapsulates the emotional pendulum swings when love and loss so color our world, but Mann gets more to the heart of the matter in “Rip In Heaven” with her to-the-skies declaration that the “present must contain a future where both of us can fit.” And you’ll soon know if the sentiments are ill-suited:
So long and sorry, darling
I was counting to forever
And never even got to ten
So long and sorry, darling
When we found a rip in heaven
We should have just ascended then.
Envious of those people who can seek and attain solace with “bourbon or God,” (“Why Must I”), Mann touches upon such either/or extremes with her confessional portraits — personal, intimate songs some may call soul-baring, others self-indulgent. In “'J' For Jules” Mann fixates upon her break-up with musician and songwriter Jules Shear, wearing her sorrow on her sleeve:
You know I'll miss you
and thus it begins
but I'll release you
and thus it continues —
Someday we'll be happy again
Someday we'll be happy again
Someday we'll be happy again...
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