Watch the video to the first song to be released from it below.
‘Queens of The Summer Hotel’, the new album from Aimee Mann, is set for release on November 5 via her own SuperEgo Records. Mann started developing the new music in 2018 when she agreed to write songs for a stage adaptation of ‘Girl, Interrupted’, Susannah Kaysen’s memoir about her psychiatric hospitalisation in the late 1960s. It was material that Mann understood well, having had her own struggles with mental illness. The album consists of a song cycle constructed from music that Mann wrote for the show, sung by Mann and orchestrated with her longtime collaborator Paul Bryan, using strings and woodwinds in a nod to the project’s theatrical origins.
In celebration of the forthcoming record, Mann is debuted the lead single, ‘Suicide Is Murder,‘ alongside an accompanying music video starring James Urbaniak, and directed and produced by Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Millerw which you can watch below.
“I started to write this song because I’ve known people who committed suicide and friends who’ve had loved ones die from suicide,” Mann notes. “I think the phrase ‘suicide is murder’ took on a meaning for me as it’s the worst thing to have to deal with in the aftermath. It’s just terrible. Because every person who knows the person who committed suicide will blame themselves in some way for not noticing or stepping in or doing something. They’ll till the end of their days, say, ‘was there something I could have done?’”
In many ways, ‘Queens of The Summer Hotel’ is the unintentional part two to Mann’s 2017’s album ‘Mental Illness’—both exploring themes of self-harm, depression and suicide. However, the new album was written more quickly than any of Mann’s previous records. The assignment to write songs for someone else’s project offered Mann “a sense of liberation, freeing her to enter another person’s consciousness and story—and a brand-new set of musical structures—through the lens of Kaysen’s own alienation. Although several different characters narrate the songs, they’re not strictly tied to any narrative. But together, they form a portrait of one woman’s crisis of disassociation as seen through another woman’s eyes.”
“I honestly felt almost possessed when I was writing this record as I’ve never written so fast and intensely,” recalls Mann. “I found the material very interesting and obviously really personal. I had specific ideas about what I thought the character’s backstory could be and incorporated a lot of shared experiences to flesh out specific characters discussed in the memoir.”
AIMEE MANN—’QUEENS OF THE SUMMER HOTEL’
1. You Fall
2. Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath
3. Give Me Fifteen
4. At The Frick Museum
5. Home By Now
6. Checks
7. Little Chameleon
8. You Don’t Have The Room
9. Suicide Is Murder
10. You Could Have Been A Roosevelt
11. Burn It Out
12. In Mexico
13. Check (reprise)
14. You’re Lost
15. I See You
