Mann and her frequent collaborator, producer, arranger and songwriter Paul Bryan, grounded the sound in the pre-hippie 1960s with the flavor of classical music running throughout the orchestration, nods to Chopin and Mozart.īryan helped give the album almost visual cues, like adding maniacal strings to “Give Me Fifteen,” a song sung by a narcistic, misogynist doctor. She got the name from a glib comment from the poet Anne Sexton, who also was treated at McLean Hospital. Mann titled the album “Queens of the Summer Hotel” so it could stand alone from whatever final “Girl, Interrupted” cast album emerged. A mention in the book that the poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell had also been treated at the same psychiatric hospital prompted the song “Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.” “Burn It Out” is about a character who set herself on fire.
So “In Mexico” is a portrait of a character in the book who lived in Mexico and shot speed. “My idea was to have each character have a song - sort of like ‘A Chorus Line’ - where each character talks about their own relationship to the overarching theme,” Mann says. Mann, who first gained fame fronting ‘Til Tuesday and earned an Oscar nod for her work on the “Magnolia” soundtrack, started with the book, marking passages she thought would make interesting songs or scenes that could conceivably translate into musical moments. A film starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie followed. The bestselling book, published in 1993, contains vivid portraits of fellow patients and helped push the discussion about how America treats mental illness. “Girl, Interrupted” is about the nearly two years Kaysen spent confined in McLean Hospital, an upscale psychiatric institution in Massachusetts. That’s kind of up to them, but because I’d had so many songs, I was like, ‘Well, now I feel like I have to record them.’” It may just be more like a play with some music. How they get used on stage doesn’t seem to bother the songwriter. While the show’s path to the stage is still up in the air, the songs it inspired have Mann’s signature sardonic humor, wry lyrics, moody melodies and powerful emotional resonance. “It’s very fun to take a piece of prose and think about how you can turn it into a song and think about what the mood of that needs to be and try to picture it as it would appear on the stage,” Mann says. It became “Queens of the Summer Hotel,” 15 songs created for a still-to-happen stage adaptation of the novel “Girl, Interrupted,” Susannah Kaysen’s memoir about her psychiatric hospitalization in the late 1960s. “Once I start really concentrating on it, it just kind of became my whole life for a while.” There were songs that I wrote in a day, which is not at all my thing,” she says. “There was just a sense of urgency and I’m not really sure why it was. They seemed to tumble out at a speed that shocked even their owner. The standard deviation for this album is 12.2.NEW YORK - The songs on Aimee Mann’s new album didn’t struggle to get out of her head. This album has a Bayesian average rating of 75.6/100, a mean average of 75.1/100, and a trimmed mean (excluding outliers) of 76.0/100. This album is rated in the top 11% of all albums on. (*In practice, some albums can have several thousand ratings) The second average might be more trusted because there is more consensus around a particular rating (a lower deviation). However, ratings of 55, 50 & 45 could also result in the same average. Consider a simplified example* of an item receiving ratings of 100, 50, & 0. A high standard deviation can be legitimate, but can sometimes indicate 'gaming' is occurring. This figure is provided as the trimmed mean.
Rating metrics: Outliers can be removed when calculating a mean average to dampen the effects of ratings outside the normal distribution. You can include this album in your own chart from the My Charts page! Magnolia collection Total Charts: The total number of charts that this album has appeared in. Latest 20 charts that this album appears in: Sort ranks