Aimee Mann — Bachelor No. 2 or, The Last Remains of the Dodo

This was the album that gave me an absolutely stunning introduction to Aimee Mann. I knew her name from years before with ‘Til Tuesday, and had probably heard about her previous release, “I’m With Stupid,” which is fine but not incredible. Then suddenly in 2000, there was a huge amount of noise about this new Aimee Mann album, with the clever title of “Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo.” Combining a reference to the old television game show “The Dating Game” with the even older fad for providing books with alternate titles – that kind of wordplay was certainly going to get my attention. And this was a record that got a lot of attention. Partly that was because Mann made a big splash by buying back the rights to her album and selling it online. This was before there was streaming – it means she was selling physical CDs online, and she was hugely successful at it.

“Bachelor No. 2” became like a part of me. It’s hard to believe it was 20 years ago, and yet it’s hard to believe it was only 20 years ago. (My younger kid, who is a few years older than this album, sometimes says they can’t imagine there was a time before Aimee Mann – her music has always been around.) The pictures she paints with her words are so specific, yet so relatable. Songs like “Ghost World” and “Red Vines” are, to me, so evocative, particularly of summer (pretty directly, as she sings of catching lightning bugs in a jar, as backdrop to an emotional storm).

Oddly, listening to it gives me a very strong memory of place, and it’s a place I can’t even be sure I was able to listen to the album, which is confusing. I should say it gives me strong memories of place, both associated with where I used to work, and two very different places. The first is just general, whenever I think of the album, an unbidden memory of my old office at 50 Wolf Road comes up. Now, this was in the days before smartphones, before streaming services. The first version of iTunes didn’t even exist yet. For those of us with desktops or laptops, it was just becoming possible to store music on them. I’m scratching my head trying to remember the name of the media player software I was using at the time (RealPlayer? MPlayer?). And there were times when I would sit in my office for a few minutes before the work day really began and just pre-decompress with some music on earbuds. So I’d say it’s possible that my association with work comes from that. The second one is very specific, and odd, and while it’s associated with work it’s from a year or two later, when we had moved to downtown Albany. For reasons I can’t really fathom, whenever I hear the line in “Ghost World” about riding her bike around the school, I envision a bike being ridden, not around the school, but around Tricentennial Park, a little downtown plaza along Broadway catercorner from where I was working. It’s a weird association, but something must have triggered it all those years ago.

The ’90s were a decade of music mostly marked by noise. Rock was all grunge and grunge-adjacent, and the radio was loud. Even the new folk we favored at the time was loud – Dar Williams was putting out some real rocking arrangements, and we saw an electrified John Prine blow the roof off the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. And then came this spare, open, simple album – while electrified, it allowed its songs to breathe, and the lyrics to really come through. Not to mention Aimee’s superb voice. From the opening bass line for “How Am I Different,” the album just draws me in, and every song hits an emotional point. Every song on this is intense, beautiful, gripping, and I’ve never stopped playing it since it came out.

Most of that play, nearly all of that play, was on CD (and then digitally, since I have iTunes Match, as I believe it’s still called, so my collection is available across all my devices). When we moved, I finally got rid of my trusty old Fisher portable CD player, the one with enough buffer that it didn’t skip too badly if you tried to walk around with it – but CD players were never really designed to be all that portable. (That was why I went strong for the MiniDisc format when it came out – really resisted skipping and was great for the gym or running.) I think the Fisher still worked, but at the time I couldn’t imagine I would ever use it again, and I was probably right. Today, CDs get ripped right into my library then put away in the deepest recesses of a closet.

For years, that’s how music worked. LPs were supplanted by CDs, and then CDs were supplanted by . . . nothing. Digital purchases, MP3s, faith in the permanence of a digital file. I haven’t tracked how many albums I bought only in digital format – but I have tracked my LP and CD collections, and it’s easy to see how those purchases (by year of release) started to tail off after 2003. For some of those years, I have only single digits of physical media to represent them. For 2013: one EP (Marshall Crenshaw), and nothing else. (Compare that to albums and 12″ singles released in 1984, my peak year, of which I have 77.)

“Bachelor No. 2” came out originally only as a CD. A limited vinyl edition was released in 2006, but I never saw it and probably wouldn’t have bought it at that time, because I wasn’t really playing vinyl very much. The shelves full of records still dominated our living room, but so did the binders of CDs (I abandoned the jewel cases and put everything into album binders), and music was primarily getting played on a CD changer. Then a version of it was released in 2020 for Record Store Day, also in a limited edition, but in 2021 they became available through Aimee’s website, and being in the midst of my current vinyl frenzy I couldn’t wait to get a copy . . . which is how I get to include it here on VinylDistractions. It’s a glorious edition, though the choice of cover stock is way less smooth and glossy than is normal for records. It’s on two colored discs with custom sleeves filled with the lyrics and Aimee’s notes on the songs. I’ll always believe records are best when they give you plenty to read as you listen, so I’ve been really enjoying this edition, and I’m happy to be able to start my tiny Aimee Mann vinyl section with the album that really introduced me to her.

Since our fandom began, we’ve been lucky enough to see Aimee quite a number of times. I remember the first time we saw her in The Egg in Albany, and being amazed that she was able to adapt these songs that one may think of as quiet and emotional into works that really screamed on stage – pumping up that crescendo in “Red Vines,” for example, into a sonic display worthy of The Church. It was incredible. But she is also able to play stripped down, just herself and another instrument, which is how we’ve seen her several times, and she still delivers the punch. Just amazing work through and through.