There are several masterpieces on this album -- in fact, I think it holds her own with her great solo albums, for the most part. However...this song is not a masterpiece. It sounds like an outtake from Coming Up Close. The lyric is good and the melody is fine, but neither is special to me; Aimee's voice is typically great; but the production is just too much of a throwback to the 1987 album, and the way the song fades out feels really limp to me. 3.3/5
Crash and Burn The constant 2-note synth and guitar (was someone listening to Human Drama’s Feel album?) seem to be there just to fill in the music track which was unnecessary- it would be a more interesting song without them but probably also make it sound more Welcome Home-ish at the same time. I’d like it to have been a more vocal/bass/drums focus on the verses. It’s a catchy lyric and of course great vocal. The worst use of a fade for Til Tuesday on record! Really leaves a feeling of unfinished business. Still a 4/5
Sorry, i missed The Other End (Of The Telescope). Until recently i was only aware of the version on the B side of Stupid Thing single (and The Ultimate Collection album) but knew of EC's involvement. Having now heard all of the versions i still (like several on here) feel Aimee's single B side version is the definitive. All are worthwhile and add something to the song though. I'd give it 4.2.
Crash and Burn A little too slick and glossy production wise for my liking. I like bits and pieces, but feel it’s not quite up to the standard of most of the rest of the album. Feels more like it could have been done by a variety of other mainstream bands of the time. 3.9/5
"Crash and Burn" is just a bit too slick for my tastes. In particular, I don't like the wailing guitar that runs throughout the entire song. This is probably my least favorite track on the album. 3.0/5
I have to agree with the rest of you, while not a bad song, Crash And Burn is nothing special. The production does it no favors. Groovelocked is right, a more spare arrangement would have better served the song.
I'll stand up for Crash and Burn. I find it catchy and memorable and I like the production and the guitar. It's in the middle tier of this album for me.
Today's song is "HOw Can You Give Up?", written by Aimee Mann and Michael Hausman; produced by Rhett Davies and Bruce Lampcov. Horns arranged by Tiger Okoshi. Lyric. Aimee Mann: Vocal, bass, acoustic guitar Robert Holmes: guitars, vocals Michael Montes: keyboards Michael Hausman: drums, percussion, programming Mike Denneen: additional keyboards Haery Ung Shin: violin Peter Abrams: French Horn Tiger Okoshi: trumpet Hal Crook: trombone Marcus Miller: bass
I'm going to to pretty much automatically like a pop track that has Tiger Okoshi and Hal Crook playing on it, not to mention Marcus Miller! But even so this is a wonderful song and an excellent closer to an outstanding album. Once again, the mix of uptempo music with lyrics that you wouldn't necessarily expect to get the uptempo treatment works wonders. This is a no doubt 5/5 for me.
How Can You Give Up? Aimee Mann and the Miami Sound Machine! An interesting combination! I would have expected this on Voices Carry, accepted it on Welcome Home, but am a little let down by it on Everything's Different Now. Apparently, things weren't so different after all. I mean, it's a happy enough song, but just strikes me as lightweight and fairly trivial compared to most of what came before on this 3rd album that showed a lot of maturity and significantly improved songwriting. In a way (in my mind), 'Til Tuesday was really the first two albums, and this 3rd album was in a lot of ways a bridge between fairly lightweight (for the most part) new wavy pop and what turned out to be a significantly different solo career. Half of the original band members were gone, new collaborations and co-writers entered the pictures, less reliance on synth and examples of really mature work some of which stands with her better solo work. But the last couple of songs were regressions to me. And that's okay. . .two steps forward and one step back is still progress. But just like Welcome Home had a really strong first side and inferior second side, the last couple of songs here don't really hold up to Why Must I, J for Jules, Limits to Love, Believed You Were Lucky, or The Other End of the Telescope. For me, there's a huge gap in quality there, but that's just my opinion. Fortunately, it's pretty much all uphill from here. 3.6/5
A decent and, dare I say, Madonna-esque pop track that fits the themes of the album; but it feels off and certainly is a rather lame ending to an album that is a near-masterpiece. Not bad, or anything; just a disappointment. 3.2
"How Can You Give Up?" is somewhat incongruous in terms of sound and style, at least in comparison to the rest of Everything's Different Now. I think it's a pretty good song, although clearly (along with "Crash and Burn") one of the lesser tracks on the LP. There's a nice melody and the uptempo, slightly Latin-sounding percussion and rhythm provides a nice tonic to the more morose mood of the rest of the album. Still, this isn't one I consider essential or a prime example of what makes this album so good. 3.5/5
How Can You Give Up This is the weakest link on the record but without all the production it could have been magical. Like the previous song- strip away almost everything but Aimee’s voice on the verses, come in with half the music production on the chorus and the impact of the track would be dramatic and make it a more meaningful song, and been the perfect bridge from “Til Tuesday” to “Aimee Mann” solo. I loathe the fade out. As the last Til Tuesday song, it should have had an end. Even fade the chorus early and have a little instrumentation but with an end. Aimee’s vocal is of course first rate even though the music is more Madonna-lite and crowded. It’s still 4/5 as a Til Tuesday track.
Everything's Different Now A real step up from Welcome Home. While not perfect, pretty consistently good except for the last couple of songs which were just OK. Dispensed with a lot of the clearly dated 80's production and some real high high quality songwriting here. Even so, as we saw with the later live recording of The Other End (of the Telescope), this could have been even better with some different choices - making some thing simpler and less slick in places. But overall, a great album and a nice, "logical" transition from Welcome Home to Whatever. 4.25/5
Welcome Home was excellent, but Everything's Different Now is a near-masterpiece. In fact, the first 7 or 8 songs are just fantastic. I personally like the sound and find that the album manages to sound of it's time, yet the eighties production touches for the most part don't detract at all from the music. I like most of them. My one problem is the album starts off strong, keeps going strong and then suddenly sort of limps to the finish line with the last couple of songs being markedly weaker than the preceding ones. I do wonder if the track-list order of the lyric sheet, which ends with "J For Jules" might have made for a more powerful allbum: Aimee Mann herself designs the album covers and packaging of every album other than Voices Carry and the track-listing we got might have been Epic Records asserting themselves; therefore the altered order of the lyric sheet might be her telling us that this was what she intended. I haven't listened to it in that order but one of these days I'll try it out. This is a song about relationships ending and the natural limits to love: a mature statement from an mature artist; and I think that here Aimee was really beginning to transcend her kind of whiny victim of love stance that she had been so prone to taking earlier. There's pain here but also sympathy and a sort of love that is not self-centred. But mainly, the songs, the or the 7 or 8 great ones, are just such superb examples of song-craft. WE'd seen glimmers of that with "Will She Just Fall Down" and "Coming Up Close"from WElcome Home, but it's all over the place here: helped, of course, in some cases by some very sturdy collaborators. I don't think the song is quite up to the level of the "Whatever", but it's a step up. I love it when you can follow an artists career and see them going from mediocre to all right to good to great to excellent...and that's what this is. It would be nearly five years before Aimee's next album, but she was definitely on a long upward arc. 4.5/5
Apologies. Somehow I overlooked it, 'twasn't personal, I promise. So...Our votes for "How Can You Give Up?" [version 2] 1-0 2-0 3-1 4-3 5-1 Average: 3.86
I think Everything's Different Now is quite possibly the best record she's ever made - certainly in the top 2 for me. It will be 10 years before we get anything nearly as wonderful. Listening to Whatever in preparation for this thread reminds me of that. Of course she went through complete record company hell to get her solo career going, the type of thing that some other artists never come back from. But she did, big time. Clearly I'm more a fan of her uptempo, pop music than many other folks here, and I think that's where Everything's Different Now really excels. I probably listen to this album more than all of her others combined. I don't feel any limping to the finish, I think the final 3 songs are absolutely tremendous. I've tried hearing the order that's on the lyric sheet and it makes no sense to me. If it was re-sequenced thank goodness for that.
Tomorrow, I'm going to start holding up songs from Aimee Mann solo debut "Whatever". About four and half years separate Everything's Different Now and "Whatever". The years were years of struggle for Aimee: shortly before the release of Everything's Different Now, Robert Holmes had left 'Til Tuesday, which left the band with only two original members: Aimee and drummer Michael Hausman and side-man Michael MOntes on keyboards. The pair built a new touring band but didn't really go on the road until later in 1989, long after Everything's Different Now had vanished from the charts without a trace and too late to really salvage it's commercial performance. (Though the tour surely didn't hurt, in fact, many record stores had never received a copy of the album in the first place. Epic was NOT behind the record.) For all practical purposes, the story of 'Til Tuesday was basically at an end after that and Aimee's solo career had begun: but this did not happen in such a clear cut way as one might think. In fact, 'Til Tuesday recorded a fourth album for Epic Records, presumably with new sideman Jon Brion, who had a musical rapport with Aimee -- but Epic exercised their right of refusal to release it, with the usual excuse that it lacked a hit single. Feeling that she was unable to write a hit to order and reasoning that, after all, no one had thought "Voices Carry" would be a hit and it was, Aimee stuck to her guns and refused to compromise. But the record company was equally adamant. At that point, Aimee seems to have sought permission to license the album to another record company, but Epic Records again refused. They thought that the album had no hits on it; but were afraid that, were another label to issue the album, they, Epic, would miss out on a potential hit. Frustrated by the absurdity of the situation, and the halt in her career, Mann and Hausman had no recourse but to take legal action to extract themselves from the Epic contract. During this time, they continued to play occasional gigs under the 'Til Tuesday moniker -- up until spring of 1992, in fact. After the usual process, they were free of the contract. In the meantime Aimee and Brion (and Hausman) continued to work on the album. I don't know if the fourth album that was recorded for Epic was "Whatever." It seems reasonable to assume that the best songs from that project made it onto the album; but the album was definitely re-recorded and retooled by the time it came out. In the end, "Whatever" would be recorded in no fewer than eight different studios, in upstate New York, in Massachusetts, and in LA. Sometime during this process, musical collaborator, the New Jersey-born Jon Brion moved house to LA and Aimee followed, keen to finish the record with him. Jon Brion was Aimee's choice to produce. Brion had never produced a record before and was originally hired as a sideman for 'til Tuesday: he would eventually become one of the great producers of the 90s and 00s. Aimee said ""He'd never produced anything before, he's a crazy eccentric musician who likes to work till seven in the morning, and it's very unlikely that any record company would agree to have him produce." This is an interesting example of Aimee's keen instinct, as Brion would later become, of course, one of the the premiere alternative producers of the 90s and 200s, responsible for many of the great albums of that time. Aimee doesn't seem to have found much success with labels at this point. In trying to shop herself around, she played showcase gigs (as 'Til Tuesday) but most labels seemed to regard her as a washed up one-hit wonder from the distant (and now distinctly uncool) 80s. AT the time, going with a minor label was not even considered: perhaps ironically, when viewed in hindsight, as a decade later Aimee would successfully pioneer the rise of the independent, self-released album with Bachelor No. 2. Back in the early 90s, Aimee was fortunate that she had people who believed in her: her new talent manager Patrick Rains financed the recording, or the re-recording, or the finishing of "Whatever" and the album was completed without any label backing. At that point, with a finished album in hand, she was able to get signed on to the prominent independent label Imago Records, who had at the time a pretty good and varied roster of artists including The Henry Rollins Band, Kylie Minogue and Dread Zeppelin (remember them?) Because Hausman had not drummed on every track, and because only he and Aimee were left of the original band, they decided to formally release the album as a solo album, ending 'Til Tuesday for good. The album featured a variety of producers and engineers: besides Brion and Aimee, Michael Hausman and Tony Berg were listed as producers. An album recorded in such a variety of places needed a good mix to unite it, and Aimee enlisted Bob Clearmountain, who had worked with 'Til Tuesday before and was one of the best in the business, to mix the album, which was released on CD and cassette (and eventually digitally) on May 11th, 1993. After it's initial pressings, it appears that Geffen became interested and bought out the contract with Imago Records and subsequent pressings were released on Geffen Records. The album charted at #127 on the Billboard Chart (#3 on the Heatseekers chart). AS of 2001 the album had sold 170 000 copies in the US alone. It was highly acclaimed critically and was included in the 2005 book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The tracklisting was: I Should've Known (Aimee Mann) Fifty Years After the Fair (Mann) 4th of July (Mann) Could've Been Anyone (Mann, Jules Shear, Marty Wilson-Piper) Put Me On Top (Mann) Stupid Thing (Mann, Jon Brion) Say Anything (Mann, Brion) Jacob Marley's Chain (Mann) Mr. Harris (Mann) I Could Hurt You Now (Mann) I know There's a Word (Mann-Brion) I've Had It (Mann) Way Back When (Mann) In addition I plan to go over the following songs: Put On Some Speed [demo] (Mann, Brion) {b-side I Should've Known} Truth Is On My Side [demo] (Mann) {b-side I Should've Known} Take It Back (Mann, Brion) {b-side I Should've Known} Jimmy Hoffa Jokes (Mann) {B-side, Say Anything} Baby Blue (Peter Ham) {B-side, Say Anything} Astronauts {7 inch single by Desk} There are two B-sides of the above single "Come On" and "If" but I haven't been able to listen to them yet to determine if Aimee's part is prominent enough to include. Desks appears to have been a one-single project between Aimee Mann and a couple of other musicians. Have I missed anything?
Her tenacity is definitely a big part of what makes her tick. There's a constant narrative of struggle and successfully overcoming obstacles through sheer force of will that continues throughout her career. I'd also posit, and this just occurred to me last night, that she was really kind of a pioneer: the first of a certain brand of earthy alternative women singer-songwriter/rockers that became so prominent in the 90s. Also one of the first of the self-released, completely independent 21st century artists. She is also at least partially responsible, in my opinion ,for bringing the prodigious talents of Jon Brion to the attention of the world.
Correction to this. Aimee and Jon Brion did NOT move to LA before "Whatever"-- when it was released she was still based in Boston and, in fact, seems to disdain the idea of moving to LA or New York. I do know that she moved to LA later (in 1994?) primarily because Brion moved there.
To me, Phoebe Bridgers - who I absolutely love - owes a lot of her songwriting to Amiee Mann, yet that never seems to get discussed or even mentioned. Whatever was where I came in and is still as far back as I tend to go, even though I have explored some Til Tuesday stuff. (I'm in a minority, for sure, as I never really cared tat much for Voices Carry.) If I recall correctly (a big if), I Should've Known was the first single, at least in the UK, and that alone made me buy the album. Anyway, getting a bit ahead...
