100 favourite songs: #41: "Save Me" - Aimee Mann

Possibly the single most elegant and poignant sulk in a back catalogue that’s full of elegant, poignant sulks, “Save Me” hit its mark with me the first time I heard it and has continued doing so ever since. It’s all there in the very first line, the lilt and lift and immediate fading fall of “you require a perfect faith” and then, repeated, echoed, “a girl in need of a tourniquet” (need I mention that I love the rhyme?), a single-voiced call and response. One of the songs that I’m thinking of when I call Mann a songwriter in the classic vein, its aching, downbeat balance of resignation and the barest of quiet hopes around a simple, finely-wrought melody make it one of those genuinely perfect pop songs for me.

…if you could save me,/from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they can never love anyone…