Aimee Mann > Quotes

“The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame.
He might get burned, but he's in the game.
And once he's in, he can't go back, he'll
Beat his wings 'til he burns them black...
No, The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. . .
The Moth don't care if The Flame is real,
'Cause Flame and Moth got a sweetheart deal.
And nothing fuels a good flirtation,
Like Need and Anger and Desperation...
No, The Moth don't care if The Flame is real. . . ”
― Aimee Mann

“Something gets lost when you translate. It's hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.”
― Aimee Mann

“All that I need now is someone with the brains and the know-how to tell me what I want.”
― Aimee Mann

“I suppose I should be happy to be misread; better be that than some of the other things I have become.”
― Aimee Mann

“The king of the jailhouse and the queen of the road think sharing the burden will lighten the load.”
― Aimee Mann

“Better take the keys and drive forever. Staying won't put these futures back together. All the perfect drugs and superheroes wouldn't be enough to bring me back to zero.”
― Aimee Mann

“I think, to be happy is to be interested and engaged.”
― Aimee Mann

“But I can't confront the doubts I have.
I can't admit that maybe the past was bad,
and so, for the sake of momentum
I'm condemning the future to death
so it can match the past.”
― Aimee Mann

“It's not easy in this phosphorescent gloom telling waking dreams apart anyhow.”
― Aimee Mann

“There comes a time when you swim or sink so I jumped in the drink 'cause I couldn't make myself clear. Maybe I wrote in invisible ink, oh I've tried to think how I could've made it appear. ”
― Aimee Mann

“Nightly you retrace your steps again to return to the scene of the crime. It's uncanny how you hover in the air of the wreckage that you left behind.”
― Aimee Mann

“Say you were split, you were split in fragments and none of the pieces would talk to you. Wouldn't you want to be who you had been? Well, maybe I'd want that too.”
― Aimee Mann

“You drew a bird that was here, a kind of sweet chanticleer. But with a terrible fear that the cage couldn't tame”
― Aimee Mann

“Anybody who cares less about wanting to be cool, I think, is more interesting.”
― Aimee Mann

“That bastard making fun of me in front of all my peers
Those people think I own this town, you're stripping all my gears
Well guess what Mr. President, I'll be seeing you
In four years

Though on the campaign trail the papers paint me like a clown
Still all I see are crowds who want to fit me for a crown
I point out all my enemies just so my fans
Bring them down

Isn't anybody going to stop me?
I don't want this job
I don't want this job, my god
Can't you tell
I'm unwell

You try to pin me down but you don't really try that hard
I throw out any shit I want and no one trumps that card
So dazzled and distracted by your fantasy
Of Hildegard

Isn't anybody going to stop me?
I don't want this job
I don't want this job, my god
Can't you tell
I'm unwell

You ask about my plan but baby my plan is to win
I wind up all the tops and watch the others keep the spin
You handing me grenades is just compelling me
To pull the pin

Isn't anybody going to stop me?
I don't want this job
I can't do this job, my god
Can't you tell
I'm unwell”
― Aimee Mann

“I became friendly with [a] bass player. . . .
He told me about this place called the Berklee College of Music, and said that you didn’t have to audition. . . . They had a summer session you could attend; that was “Come one, come all.” So I went there and it opened a lot of doors for me. First of all, the ear training—to work on your ear and learn to hear things you’d heretofore not been able to ascertain, individual instruments, chords and where they went, and remember melodies better . . . I’d just thought, either you could do it or you couldn’t. That plus learning about chord progressions and music theory, and which chords sound good going into other chords . . . that was really a revelation. . . .

So I started applying that to writing songs.
Which were all terrible. But you do it enough, and you get better at it.”
― Aimee Mann

“When you're younger, a lot of your . . . art or music or whatever is more about just trying to look like you're an artist . . . trying to look like you're a certain thing or trying to . . . just . . . fit in. . . .

Older artists kind of don't care about that as much. . . . That's liberating and feels more like what true art should be about. . . .

When I first started writing songs, all I wanted to do was a write a song that sounded like another song so that it sounded like . . . . a legitimate thing. Not necessarily . . . a song that expresses anything I'm actually thinking . . . or feeling.

Here's what I'm mostly thinking or feeling in my early 20s: 'I-I hope I fit in.' . . . And that's not that interesting. . . . 'I hope people don't think I'm a fraud. . . . I want to be liked.' . . .
That seems kind of anti-art, really. . . .”
― Aimee Mann

“I think people in general, no matter what they do, first need a cheerleader. Then they can sit down and go, ‘Okay, what is wrong with it?’ or ‘What should we do now?’ But the first thing out of anybody’s mouth can’t be, ‘You’re not doing it right.”
― Aimee Mann