Although, as ever, there's plenty of other music floating around me, The Forgotten Arm has been very much the soundtrack to my last few weeks. The achingly pretty heartbrokenness of "Little Bombs" and "That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart" has kept them my favourites, but I've grown to love every song - especially, at the moment, the incongruously jaunty "I Can't Get My Head Around It" and the moody "King of the Jailhouse".
This isn't the place to rehash all the reasons why I like Mann's music so much, but one thing which struck me yesterday, walking home after uni and listening to the album, was that the specific lyrical concerns of her songs, and of those on this album in particular, often aren't particularly consonant with my own experiences and life - I mean, what do I know about co-dependent love affairs, or the helplessness of being in love with someone who I know is going to let me down? But, despite that, for me the lyrics play a large part in the brilliance of her music, and really speak to me, and I think that there are two reasons for this.
First, the literacy and evocativeness of many of the lines cause them to stand out and stick in the mind quite irrespective of the words around them ("kicking is hard, but the bottom's harder"; "and though the exit is crude, it saves me coming unglued"; "you pulled up and parked your El Dorado/we said 'hi' and kissed with some bravado"...). And second, and relatedly, Mann's songs are so well constructed that often the most memorably universal lines are placed so that they become central to the musical shape of the piece, being highlighted and repeated at key times (choruses, especially), so that the lyrical and melodic hooks often coincide: "baby, there's something wrong with me"; "that's just not the way you make me feel", "life just kind of empties out", "that's how I knew this story would break my heart"...As a result, the sadness in such lines takes on a universally resonant tone - another element of Mann's wonderful songcraft.
I still think of Bachelor No 2 as the high water mark of Mann's discography, partly because it's indefinably somehow sharper-edged and more clear-sighted, partly because it seems to both soar and ache just a bit more vividly, but mostly, I think, because it was the first of her albums that I heard - but The Forgotten Arm isn't far behind, and it's that latter which is speaking most clearly to me at the moment.
