Aimee Mann steps into the ring

updated 11:14 a.m. ET May 9, 2005

NEW YORK - Here’s an image hard to get out of your head: wiry singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, chronicler of the emotionally fragile, whaling the tar out of somebody in a boxing ring.

You’re as likely to find her in boxing gloves than with a guitar these days. An exercise routine has turned into a passion, and Mann will even go a couple of rounds with her bass player to keep in shape while on tour.

Imagine what happens if he flubbed a note onstage the night before.

During a recent interview in a Soho lounge, Mann talked animatedly about picking up the fine points of the sport, and how she applies it to her job.

“It’s really difficult,” she said. “That’s what I like about it. There’s always something new to learn, something new to work on.”

Mann, 44, named her new album “The Forgotten Arm,” which came out Tuesday, after an obscure boxing term for a surprise punch. It’s a loosely constructed concept disc about — you guessed it — a boxer, and a woman who ran away with him in the 1970s.

With Green Day and Neil Young releasing their own concept albums in the past year or so, do we sniff a trend?

“It’s a direct reaction to the marketplace becoming more and more and more about one song,” she said. “The single is more singlelike than ever and more disposable than ever. There are certain artists who are really getting sick of that.”

Thinking cinematically
Mann, who releases discs on her own label, said she also has the freedom to try different things without executives second-guessing her.

Mann’s biggest success came with the songs she wrote and performed for the movie “Magnolia,” which also gave her experience with a new kind of songwriting. Instead of writing songs specifically for a movie scene, she began writing to a movie playing in her head.

She wrote two songs while thinking about a loosely constructed story of a boxer who fights at the Virginia State Fair in the early 1970s. He met a local girl eager to escape her hometown and they fell in love.

Finding she liked the process, Mann kept going, and rewrote other songs she’d been working on to fit the story.

“It’s not like a real plot-laden story,” she said. “They run off together and he has a drug problem that goes out of control. They split up, then it’s just what happens in their heads. But it was sort of nice to think about the same people from song to song.”

Though hardly autobiographical (Mann’s happily married to fellow musician Michael Penn, not a drug-addicted boxer) she did grow up in Virginia and spent a lot of time at the state fair.

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