I decided a while back that Bachelor No 2 is, these days, my single favourite album; and while there are better songs on the record, I’m not sure if there are any (with the possible exception of “Save Me”) which affect me as “Ghost World” can.
It starts unceremoniously, a perfunctory chug of the guitar and then straight into it:
“Finals blew, I barely knew my graduation speech,/ With college out of reach, if I don’t find a job it’s down to dad and Myrtle Beach…”
Sulky, spiky, and tart but sweet at the same time (I’ve thought before that if Mann’s music had a flavour, it would be citrus), with a quiet sadness underneath it, not only is it what she does best, but it’s perfectly suited to the mood of this song…and leads seamlessly into the chorus, which has a hint of the soaring to it but, aptly, only gets partway there:
”…so I’m bailing this town — or tearing it down — or probably more like hanging around…”
The first two lines of the next verse deepen the sense of drifting, disengaged summer alienation…
”Everyone I know is acting weird or way too cool,/They hang out by the pool,/So I just read a lot and ride my bike around the school…”
…but it’s the third line which is the first really magic Aimee Mann moment in the song, as her drowsy, disaffected backing vocals float in, accentuating and counterpointing, and wrapping the words in another layer of wistfulness.
”…cause I’m bailing this town — or tearing it down — or probably more like hanging around…”
…and then the bridge, musically flowing smoothly from what's gone before but lyrically unexpected, crisp, emphatic, with just a hint of yearning to its tone:
”…and all that I need now is someone with the brains and the know-how to tell me what I want, anyhow…”
A pause, then:
”12th of June, a gibbous moon,/Was this the longest day? I’ll walk down to the bay and jump off of the dock and watch the summer waste away…”
…a return to the verse, and it does feel like a return — the first three phrases a bit more restrained, a bit more tentative…and then the second glorious Aimee moment of the song, coming at the corresponding point in this verse to that in the earlier, everything dropping away for a fraction of a moment before the drums and the guitar push things forward again and there’s a new fluency and poignancy to Mann’s singing as her narrator quite literally immerses herself in this bittersweet, tremblingly poised ‘freedom’ and once again we feel that sense of almost-soaring.
”…then I’m bailing this town — or tearing it down — or probably more like hanging around…probably more like hanging around…so tell me what I want…”
…fade out, on three and a half minutes of the most perfectly pitched evocation of late-teenage (and beyond) anomie you could ever hope to hear.
(And see also here.)
