Speaker 1:
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

David Remnick:
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Hi, I'm Kelefa Sanneh. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker Magazine and on behalf of The New Yorker Magazine and The New Yorker Festival, thanks for coming out, whether you're with us here....

David Remnick:
Last month a crowd gathered in Brooklyn to hear from a special guest.

Kelefa Sanneh:
The guy I'm sitting next to has been destroying stages ever since the 1980s when he was a rambunctious punk kid playing with hardcore bands in the DC area.....

David Remnick:
Rock musician, Dave Grohl.

Kelefa Sanneh:
It's true. He changed the world with Nirvana and then kept changing with Foo Fighters who are now 10 albums into one of the most epic rock and roll runs of all time.

David Remnick:
Dave Grohl's epic run began as the drummer for Nirvana.

David Remnick:
And then after the death of Kurt Cobain, Grohl became a front man with his own band called the Foo Fighters.

David Remnick:
On this Thanksgiving weekend, we wanted to take a little break from the news of the world, and we're going to bring you two conversations with two musicians from last month's New Yorker Festival. Later in the hour, we'll hear performance from Aimee Mann, but first up here's Dave Grohl. Grohl's new memoir is called "The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music." He joined staff writer Kelefa Sanneh on stage at the Skyline Drive-In in Brooklyn. Now it's out on the Brooklyn Waterfront, and as they talk, you might hear something creaking in the breeze, off the East River.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Please freak out for Dave Grohl. Awkward. So Dave, we're here at The New Yorker Festival and we're here to talk about your literary career which began at age 14, I think around there, with a letter you wrote to your dad.

Dave Grohl:
Well, okay. So both of my parents were writers. My mother was a public school teacher for 35 years. She taught, yes, let's hear it for the teachers.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Yes.

Dave Grohl:
We love the teacher. She taught creative writing and she was a forensics coach and a debate coach. And my father was a speech writer and a journalist on Capitol Hill. We grew up outside of Washington DC. So, not only the written word, but also spoken word in our house was valued, so that, I don't know if I told you, but we would do these articulation drills at dinner.

Kelefa Sanneh:
What?

Dave Grohl:
Yes. My mother would give us a topic to speak about and we'd have to speak for maybe three minutes without interrupted speech. So it could be anything. It could be brownies and you'd have to talk about brownies for three minutes without saying um, or like, or you know, so also they were great storytellers.

Dave Grohl:
Anyway, so what you're referring to was my runaway note when I was 14 years old, where I finally kind of ran away from my dad's apartment. And it was a defining moment in my life because at the time I was playing music, but I wasn't allowed to, because I was such a horrible student and I was playing in punk rock bands. And in these punk rock bands, you basically did everything yourselves, right? You made your own records, you made your own t-shirts, you booked your own shows. So I had tried my hand at becoming a promoter.

Kelefa Sanneh:
How did that go?

Dave Grohl:
I made a hundred bucks. It worked out okay.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Did the bands get paid?

Dave Grohl:
Everyone got paid and I made a hundred dollars. It was great. But anyway, so yes. So what you're referring to is probably that.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Yes.

Dave Grohl:
And it was at that point where I was discovering independence and I talk about this sometimes that there's a golden window of opportunity in every child's life where independence and identity intersect, and so you're no longer just like arm candy, like holding your parents' hand when you cross the street, you're allowed to become who you're going to become. And at that point I knew that I was going to be a musician and that I was going to have to do it all myself and so that was the beginning of that.

Kelefa Sanneh:
And you set this down. You set it down in an actual letter, it was like a manifesto, right? It was like here's what my life's going to be like.

Dave Grohl:
Yeah. I was basically just saying if you only knew what I did last night and everything that I put into it and I did this all myself and I'm proud of me and so I think this is what I'm capable of. And if you don't have faith in me, then I'm just going to go do it on my own. And so I did.

Kelefa Sanneh:
This-

Dave Grohl:
Kids stay in school, don't do drugs.

Kelefa Sanneh:
So it seems like your story with music, there is this origin story involving the song, "You're So Vain."

Dave Grohl:
So, okay, so also both of my parents were also musicians. So when my mother and I would drive around in our car, we would sing along to '70s AM Radio.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Right.

Dave Grohl:
And there was one day we were driving around and Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" came on and we're both singing together. And then it gets to the chorus part and I was singing the Mick Jagger part and my mom was singing the... And so we break off in harmony and it was in that moment that I realized and understood that two different notes form accord. I'm like wait a second. Hold on a second. And then the kick drum does that, and then the snare drum does that, and then, so I started listening to music not just as a sound, I was listening to music and the patterns.

Dave Grohl:
And some people experience this condition called synesthesia where you can actually see sound and it kind of started happening to me. I would imagine music in these sort of Lego shapes in my head. So if it, still to this day, like if I hear a drum track, I can hear it and see it in these shapes, so it's great because I don't read music, that's how I memorize things in my head. So if you play me a drum track or an arrangement of a song, as I'm listening I'm visualizing it and then I can play it back for like that.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Right.

Dave Grohl:
So, yeah, that was a huge moment and that's when I fell in love with music and that's when I went home and was playing with the Beatles records on the floor, playing drums with my teeth. Hold on a second. Let me see if I can do it. I don't know if the mic's. I got. All right, let's see if I can do it. Ready? Okay, hold on, check, check. Ready? You're going to have to crank the mic for one second, Mr. Sound Guy. Here it comes, ready?

Dave Grohl:
Okay, it's not sound good. Anyway. So, it was so bad I went to the dentist one time and he's like, "Do you chew a lot of ice?" I was like, "No, why?" He's like, "Well, because you have an unusual amount of deterioration and..." I was like, "Oh dude, I can play drums with my teeth."

Kelefa Sanneh:
So, as a writer, I don't always get to pick my own headlines or titles, but I did get to pick the title for this event, which was Maximum Rock and Roll, a phrase that describes your life and career, but was also the title of a magazine that was important to you as a kid.

Dave Grohl:
Absolutely.

Kelefa Sanneh:
A magazine that was like the punk bible that helped kids find each other that were into punk rock, but that also had a reputation for being kind of self righteous and kind of obnoxious. What does that phrase, maximum rock and roll, mean to you?

Dave Grohl:
Okay, so for people that don't know about the underground music scene that we grew up in listening to music, I discovered this punk rock thing in 1983 through a cousin of mine that lived in Chicago. And I had started playing music and I loved bands like DEVO and The B-52's and things like that, the Beatles and Kiss and Zeppelin. But I didn't realize that there was an underground network of bands and labels and magazines that was like this community. But before anything online, it was this really grassroots community of people that were doing it all themselves.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Right.

Dave Grohl:
But yes, it was also filled with this ethically suffocating punk rock manifesto.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Right. Right.

Dave Grohl:
And so, to be perfectly honest, I was more attracted to the independence and the musicality of what was going on or lack of musicality. It was just the energy of the whole thing I thought was very cool.

Kelefa Sanneh:
But you've said, I mean in your book you talk about those years and how you go from playing with Scream in D.C.

Dave Grohl:
Yeah.

Kelefa Sanneh:
To suddenly you're in a big band and your relationship with this punk rock world is changing.

Dave Grohl:
Well, it's difficult to kind of join the two. Like when you're raised in that ethically suffocating punk rock scene, you're conditioned to reject any conformity, any sort of popularity or whatever it is. Nirvana came from that same scene, but there was a problem is that Kurt's songs were so good that it's like we never expected that we would become as big as we did, but it was almost inevitable with his songs and his lyrics and his voice. So then once we became successful and popular, we felt conflicted in this way that we had sort of betrayed the scene that we were raised in the underground when we really hadn't done anything differently than what we had done before, it was just that now the songs were being heard.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Did it feel slow at the time? Did it feel like the steady thing of like my band's getting bigger?

Dave Grohl:
No.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Feel like-

Dave Grohl:
No, it happened really quickly. The big moment was the first time we played on Saturday Night Live. And that's where I grew up watching that show in the seventies, not only for like the comedy and the brilliant cast that they had, but for the music, because that's where I saw live performance. I'd never seen a concert, but I saw the B-52s, and I saw Peter Tosh, and I saw DEVO, and I saw Fear, and Bowie, and things like that. So when we went to go do that first SNL, just knowing that my drum set was in the same place that all of these legends had been, I was just like, it's crazy.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Was there any trepidation? Was there any sense of like, well, I don't know if we want to be an SNL kind of band? Or were you guys just like, "This is amazing, let's do it."

Dave Grohl:
There was once when we were meeting with all the record companies in New York, long before anybody really knew who Nirvana was. And we were in the office of this guy named Donnie Ienner, who was the head of, I think Columbia Records or something. And it was in this big, high rise office and he's behind this big oak desk and he's a music executive guy. And he goes, "Well, what do you guys want?" And Kurt goes, "We want to be the biggest band in the world." And I thought he was kidding. So it's weird. I think that there was some sort of ambition there, but I don't think anybody had any understanding or any real expectation.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Would you guys talk about it? Would you talk like strategy? Like-

Dave Grohl:
No.

Kelefa Sanneh:
No.

Dave Grohl:
We barely talked. No. We wouldn't even talk about writing songs. We would begin every rehearsal with this sort of improvisational noise jam and just kind of do this free form freak out thing. If it was a quiet part, I would sit there and I would watch Kurt's Converse sneaker get closer and closer and closer to the distortion pedal. And I was like, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes. And then right before he stepped on it, I go whadadadada, and that's how we wrote songs. I looked at his foot the entire time. So we weren't discussing, "Well, I think the bridge of this song should be in a minor key and go seven times." Instead I watched the sneaker the whole time.

Kelefa Sanneh:
So, one of the amazing things about your book, I went through it to make sure that I didn't miss something. I did like a global search through the text for the word Utero.

Dave Grohl:
Okay.

Kelefa Sanneh:
And it didn't return anything. And I said this is-

Dave Grohl:
Yeah, I didn't mention the Utero.

Kelefa Sanneh:
I was like this guy made a record that sold like 15 million copies around the world and you've done so many things in your life that like this is just another record you made.

Dave Grohl:
Absolutely not, okay? The biggest challenge in writing this book was deciding what to write and what not to write.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Right.

Dave Grohl:
The way I wrote it, I wrote it in sort of this short story format. And it all began last year when the pandemic hit and I had nothing to do, I started this Instagram page, Dave's Truth Stories. And so I started writing these little short stories for this Instagram thing. And then once I realized that this was going to be more than just a few weeks, I'm like it's time to write the book. I had made a list of 30 or 40 stories for the Instagram page and I signed a book deal and I gave my editor the list of the 30 or 40. And I said, "Just tell me what you want me to write." And so she would kind of shorter to cook me. She was like, "Write about joining Nirvana. Write about this and that."

Dave Grohl:
I could write a book about every chapter of this book. So it was like I could write an entire book about Nirvana or Scream or the Foo Fighters. I was 300 pages in and I hadn't even mentioned the Foo Fighters yet. And I was just like, "Oh my God, my guys are going to kill me if I don't at least say like, oh yeah, and then I started another band." So it was really difficult. At one point my editor was like, "Stop writing. You got to stop writing." I was like, "Really? Okay." So I did.

Dave Grohl:
So In Utero, that was a difficult time. After going through the success of Nevermind and being conflicted and at this ethical crossroads, we decide to continue and we make an album where the opening lines are, "Teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm bored and old." And so when I listen, it's actually kind of hard for me to listen to that record because it was a difficult time, but also because it's so real that record. That record's real.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Did you ever second guess yourself and wonder whether this was what you actually wanted to do?

Dave Grohl:
Music?

Kelefa Sanneh:
Yeah.

Dave Grohl:
No.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Even when things were at their darkest and weirdest with Nirvana.

Dave Grohl:
Well after Kurt died, I was like, "I'm not playing music anymore, it's too painful." And then I eventually realized that if music saved my entire life, this is what's going to save my life again. But no, I never, that's probably the only time I ever stopped playing music. Yeah, I've never not needed it, so.

Kelefa Sanneh:
How long did you stop for?

Dave Grohl:
It was maybe six or seven months or something like that. I couldn't even turn on the radio. It was hard. So, yeah. And then I realized like, okay, I have to kind of write my way out of it. Pick up an instrument and play it again. Play the drums and kind of get my way out of this that way.

David Remnick:
Dave Grohl, the musician and author of a new memoir called The Storyteller. And he's been talking with Kelefa Sanneh. Our conversation continues in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

David Remnick:
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. We've been hearing from Dave Grohl, who first achieved global fame in the band, Nirvana. In 1994, after Kurt Cobain's death, Grohl went on to form the Foo Fighters, and he moved from the drums to front man, singing and playing guitar. They took the name Foo Fighters from an old slang term, pilots' slang from World War II that described UFOs. Let's pick up with Dave Grohl at this year's New Yorker Festival. He's speaking with the staff writer, Kelefa Sanneh.

Kelefa Sanneh:
As you probably know, people have ideas about drummers, right? So when people hear like, "Oh, the drummers got a new thing," they're like, "Oh, it's going to be this like intense drum driven thing," but you turned out to be making these amazing demos as a singer-songwriter.

David Remnick:
Thank you.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Which is not what anyone was expecting.

Dave Grohl:
Nor was I. No, I mean, that was always, so when I was young, I figured out how to multi-track with these two cassette decks. So I'd like record something on this cassette, put that cassette in the player, hit play on that, put another cassette in there, hit record and play drums along to it, so now I have something with drums and guitar on it. So I was always into the idea of like that multi-tracking, that combination of elements and the thing that I heard that first day in the car with my mom, it was like a puzzle, it was like a game.

Dave Grohl:
And so I would write and record these songs by myself, but I'm like this sucks. And so I was just banking all of these songs. And while I was in Nirvana, I wasn't going to disturb the radical creative process we already had by going in and, I mean, it's a famous joke, what's the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band, "Hey guys, I got a song I think we should play." So, when you're in a band like Nirvana and Kurt's writing songs, you're like this works the way it works. Yeah.

Kelefa Sanneh:
So, when did you start thinking like maybe I should share these songs that I've been making?

Dave Grohl:
Well, I sort of did on like some funny, like punk rock compilations in the early nineties, I think like right around the time I first joined Nirvana, but I don't even think I put my name on it. Anyway, after Kurt died and the band was over, I did a bunch of soul searching and I actually, I decided, okay, I'm going to disappear. I'm going to go to the most remote place on earth. I'm just going to get away from everything and figure it out. So I went to the Ring of Kerry in Ireland where I'd been before. It's so beautiful there. And you really feel like you're just at the end of the earth and there's nothing serene and it's so beautiful.

Dave Grohl:
And I was driving around in my rental car on a country road and I saw this hitchhiker kid and I thought, well, maybe I'll pick him up. And as I got closer to him, I saw that he had a Kurt Cobain t-shirt on. And it was Kurt's face looking back at me in the middle of nowhere and I realized like, oh, I can't outrun this, so I need to go home and get back to work. And so I did. I went back and I started recording these songs by myself and really just with the intention of just continuing life. That's what I needed to do to survive. And it helped a lot.

Kelefa Sanneh:
When did you realize like, oh, these songs that I was kind of maybe nervous to share, like people really like them?

Dave Grohl:
I recorded the first record by myself in like six days and I made a hundred cassettes. Cassettes. And I was so stoked that I could go to this cassette duplication place and like, "I designed the insert. Like I picked the font."

Kelefa Sanneh:
Did you give yourself credit in the liner notes?

Dave Grohl:
Unfortunately, my name is nowhere in that thing at all. I called it Foo Fighters because I didn't want people to know it was me because of the baggage that came with that. Also because it was plural. I imagine that if a band name is pluralized that did like, "Oh, it sounds like a gang," whatever. It's the stupidest name in the world. But I was like literally giving this cassette to people at gas stations and then someone from a record company called and said, "Hey, we want to put out your record." I'm like, "The cassette thing? Okay. All right."

Dave Grohl:
But then this is the good part. This is the best part, to me, personally, is that then I called my manager, John, my lawyer, Jill. I don't think anybody expected much was going to happen, but my lawyer said, "Listen, don't just give it to someone. That's yours. Start your own label and do everything yourself like you did when you were a kid." And so I went right back to where I was when I was a teenager, starting my own label, recording my own songs, and we still to this day, like I'm the president of our record company, Roswell Records.

Kelefa Sanneh:
When this thing, this Foo Fighters thing that started as a demo tape is becoming real and you're putting together a band and the songs are getting played on the radio and I'm sure people at the record company are all excited and kids are showing up to the shows, was there any trepidation of like, "Oh, I'm back in this like rock and roll star machine again?"

Dave Grohl:
No. Well, it was different. I knew that if I just, I had offers to go play drums with other bands, but I knew if I just sat down at a drum stool that it would like forever remind me of losing Nirvana.

Kelefa Sanneh:
But it's also more spotlight, right? You can imagine a different version of your life story where you're a working musician as opposed to the guy in the center of the stage with the spotlight on you, in a guitar, singing the songs and the stadium is singing along.

Dave Grohl:
Well, I was kind of born with a drummer mentality, which is just like keep the beat and keep the people moving. It's a comfortable place to be. Like if I go to record with someone, I don't walk in there like, "I'm Dave Grohl, I'm going to play like this." I walk in and I'm like, "What do you need? Tell me what you want me to do." And then I do it. "Is that cool?" And I like that. I like facilitating someone else's boogie. It's fun. It's cool. As a front man dude, it took me forever to get comfortable with doing that. A decade, at least.

Dave Grohl:
Well you don't. Okay. So I actually, another revelation, a big moment for me, there was once where I was asked to go play at the White House. Paul McCartney was getting a Gershwin Award, which is a huge honor. And there was a performance in the East Room of the White House and there were all these people invited to play, Jack White, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder, performing in this tiny room in the East Room. It was very small, and with Paul's band. I got invited and I'm like, "Oh, cool. I'm going to play with Paul at this thing." And they're like, "No, no, no, no. You're going to sing this to Paul and President Obama who'll be sitting three feet in front of you staring at you doing this thing." And I was so incredibly nervous.

Dave Grohl:
And I remember being like about to walk on stage thinking this might be the coolest thing I've ever done in my entire life. Considering growing up in DC, being on the other side of the fence at the Rock Against Reagan concerts. Now I'm in front of President Obama and Paul McCartney. And I was so terrified. I'm like, okay, I'm going to puke. I'm going to faint. This is going to be the worst thing ever. And then I stopped and I'm like, hold on a second, this is the most extraordinary thing that's ever happened to me and I'm going to waste on being scared? That. I was like this is only going to last for five minutes and it really did it. It changed me. So, I was terrified to come up here with you.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Yeah, it's on the same level, I'm sure. Well, I'm going to take this moment [crosstalk 00:25:48], Dave Grohl.

Dave Grohl:
All right.

Kelefa Sanneh:
Thank you and see you next time. Thank you.

David Remnick:
Staff writer, Kelefa Sanneh, talking with rock musician and now author, Dave Grohl. His new book is called The Storyteller and our conversation was recorded last month at The New Yorker Festival. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around for a performance from Aimee Mann, coming up in just a moment.

David Remnick:
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. If you're familiar with the musician Aimee Mann, it may be because of this 1980s earworm.

Aimee Mann:
(singing).

David Remnick:
Or you may remember her soundtrack for the film "Magnolia," back in 1999. Aimee Mann has been celebrated for her mastery of the craft of songwriting for a long time. In a review in The New Yorker years ago, Nick Hornby said that Mann writes, "Proper lyrics instead of 10th rate poetry." Her new album is called "Queens of the Summer Hotel," which was inspired by the memoir "Girl, Interrupted." Last month, Aimee Mann appeared at The New Yorker Festival and let's start with a song.

Aimee Mann:
(singing).

David Remnick:
That was Aimee Mann, performing "I See You" with Jonathan Coulton and Jason Hart. It's from her new album, "Queens of the Summer Hotel," which was inspired in part by "Girl, Interrupted," Susanna Kaysen's bestselling memoir. The title of the summer hotel actually refers to the psychiatric hospital in Kaysen's book. At the New Yorker Festival, Mann spoke with staff writer Atul Gawande, whom you might know better as an expert on public health, on COVID, and much more, but Atul is also a really passionate music fan.

Atul Gawande:
You sent me the album and I really appreciate that and I got to listen to it on a day I'd come out of my surgery clinic, for those who don't know I'm up in Boston and I work as a surgeon and in public health, and one song called "Fifteen Minutes" got to me.

Aimee Mann:
Oh, God.

Atul Gawande:
And Susanna Kaysen, who wrote the memoir Girl, Interrupted, it opens with her going in to see a psychiatrist she's never seen before and 15 minutes later, she is involuntarily, more or less involuntarily admitted to-

Aimee Mann:
Kind of coerced, yeah, coerced to-

Atul Gawande:
To be admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital where she'd spend almost the next two years.

Aimee Mann:
Yeah.

Atul Gawande:
And-

Aimee Mann:
Which is a long time.

Atul Gawande:
It's a long time and "Fifteen Minutes" was about the 15-minute appointment, which my day is made up of 15-minute appointments. It is gruesome to think about like how we move people in now, right?

Aimee Mann:
Yeah. I made it a funny song, but it isn't, yeah.

Atul Gawande:
He's an over the top psychiatrist by the time you're done. You might say a couple of the lyrics about electro shock, for example.

Aimee Mann:
Yeah. Let me see if I can remember it. Hold on a second.

Atul Gawande:
Let's hear it. Let's do it.

Aimee Mann:
(singing).

Aimee Mann:
Something like that. Anyways, so I didn't really take it that seriously.

Atul Gawande:
It is. The memoir is actually hysterical and you manage to bring out, I understand your attraction to it, right? It's dark and it's funny at the same time.

Aimee Mann:
I think that that's sort of how you have to be if you find yourself in a mental institution and you're surrounded by other mental patients, you have to have some humor about it, right?

Atul Gawande:
Yeah. Well, so, I re-read the memoir for this show and the thing that struck me was it is funny and at the same time this dark sense that here are these people who've lost the thread of, I mean almost all of them have attempted to commit suicide at one point or another in the book and they've lost the thread of what makes life worth living. And in my own work, whether it's cancer patients or others, the question that I often like to ask people are questions about out what they find makes life worth living so that we make sure we preserve that along the way. And it's one of my favorite questions to ask as it's turned out, like one person I got to write about had said that, "Look, if I can eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on television, that will be good enough for me."

Aimee Mann:
Wow. Low bar.

Atul Gawande:
So, low bar, what would it be for you? What's the minimum quality of life you'd find acceptable?

Aimee Mann:
Being around my friends. Yeah, I think that's the most important thing and making music.

Atul Gawande:
I was going to say...

Aimee Mann:
Yeah, making music.

Atul Gawande:
You didn't immediately say music. If you could make music, that would really-

Aimee Mann:
Dude, I think if the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that people need to be around other human beings and more than one. Sorry, my spouse. But more than just one. Yeah, I need a little group of friends which is what a band is. And that's why I like to play live and I love playing with other musicians. It's like a shared thing. It's like three brains forming to make this other thing.

Atul Gawande:
The next song that you're induced "Goose Snow Cone."

Aimee Mann:
Yeah.

Atul Gawande:
And this one struck me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding it, as being out of keeping with your dark tendencies. It was based on a cute Instagram photo that friends posted of a snowy white cat.

Aimee Mann:
Well, it was inspired by the cat.

Atul Gawande:
Yes.

Aimee Mann:
And then immediately took a left turn into being very depressing, so.

Atul Gawande:
Oh, good.

Aimee Mann:
So yes. So don't worry. Yeah. So my friends had this cat named Goose and I was on tour in Dublin and it was very cold and snowy. And I saw this picture of the cat in her little cone, the cone of shame, and she looked like a little snow cone, because her face was like a round white, fluffy ball. And so I started writing this song thinking that I would change the phrase, goose snow cone, to something else later. And it's called "Goose Snow Cone," so it just didn't happen.

Atul Gawande:
"Goose Snow Cone" and Aimee Mann.

Aimee Mann:
(singing).

Aimee Mann:
Thank you so much.

Atul Gawande:
There are very few New Wavers who have an ongoing musical career, Duran Duran, no, Spandau Ballet, no.

Aimee Mann:
I bet Duran Duran could fill some theater.

Atul Gawande:
You can fill but not creating new music that people still are drawn, not just still are drawn to you, building new audiences and reaching people in new ways, the way you have been.

Aimee Mann:
Well, thank you-

Atul Gawande:
But I would love to ask you about, you got there and it was a dark journey through record company travails. Can you tell us a little bit about what you went through before you came out the other side?

Aimee Mann:
Well, being on a major label at the point where I was in the eighties and early nineties, I think, the music industry is one of those industries where people feel like there's easy money and if they can just figure out what the formula for having a hit song is, then they will make that easy money. And then they go to the artist and they say, "We need you to sound exactly like this thing that is already on the radio. And here are dumb ideas for how to do that." And this was, I mean, that really is about the size of it. And that was a situation I really chafed at because I felt like if you don't like the music I'm doing, then just release me from my contract. So, it was just a lot of waiting that out....

Atul Gawande:
Years. You recorded "Bachelor No. 2" in the album that would be a breakout for you.

Aimee Mann:
Yeah, "Bachelor No. 2," I had recorded and it was finished, though it was a complicated situation, I was on Geffen, and Geffen and a bunch of other labels merged into Interscope. So Interscope was getting a huge influx of other artists. And they actually told me I could leave if I wanted to and I was like, thank you, Jesus. Finally, I can get out of this. And at that point, the internet wasn't really a thing, but enough of a thing so you could have a kind of a mail order situation. And I was like I don't care if I have to sell this out of the back of a van, I just have to get out of this situation.

Atul Gawande:
So now who do you write for? I remember seeing a talk from several writers where they'd answer the question, why do you write? And one did say, "I write to illuminate relationships because it's the relationships between people I don't want to understand." The other person said, "I write because I want to stick it to the man."

Aimee Mann:
Well....

Atul Gawande:
Why do you write?

Aimee Mann:
For different reasons. I really do. Relationships between people is very interesting. Finding or going through or observing a complicated situation and boiling it down to its essence in three-and-a-half minutes is very interesting. It's like a little magic trick or a puzzle. I like getting inside other people's heads and writing from their perspective to see what it's like and then see where I intersect with that person. So there's different reasons, but I, there's something that's sort of magical that happens when you have a complicated problem or feeling when you put that into words. And that's really interesting and it's like an ink plot, it's a raw shock test. You see things in it. And then the things suggest a story and so you start writing a story and it's just very interesting to me.

Atul Gawande:
Aimee, this has been just fantastic and-

Aimee Mann:
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Atul Gawande:
One last time, please give it up for Aimee Mann.

David Remnick:
That's staff writer, Atul Gawande, speaking with Aimee Mann. We'll close now with Save Me, which appeared on the soundtrack to the film, Magnolia. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. See you next time.

Aimee Mann:
(singing).

Speaker 1:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado.

Speaker 6:
We had assistance this week from the New Yorker Festival, including Katherine Stirling, Amanda Miller, and Nico Brown, also Michael Etherington and his team, and a very special thank you to Fabio Bertoni and WNYC's Joe Plourde.

Speaker 1:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported, in part, by the Charina Endowment Fund.

Aimee Mann:
(singing).

 

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