Tickets
Join the waitlist for tickets for Aimee Mann at scmcgr.org.
St. Cecilia Music Center (SCMC) presents popular folk artist Aimee Mann in concert with special guest Jonathan Coulton on Thursday, February 29, 2024 on the Acoustic Café Folk Series. Aimee Mann will perform her iconic music including her newest release, “Queens of the Summer Hotel”, out now via her own Super Ego Records. Jonathan Coulton, often called "JoCo" by fans, is an American folk/comedy singer-songwriter and will open the show.
Executive & Artistic Director of SCMC Cathy Holbrook says, “We are thrilled to bring Aimee Mann to St. Cecilia Music Center on the Acoustic Café Folk Series. Aimee has released her newest album “Queens of The Summer Hotel” on her own SuperEgo Records, with great reviews from The New York Times and other music media outlets. We are excited that she has selected St. Cecilia Music Center in Grand Rapids as one of her tour destinations that include multiple performances at Los Angeles’ Largo at the Coronet and New York’s City Winery.”
After her successful career in the 80’s with new wave band ’Til Tuesday, Aimee Mann began her solo career in 1993 with the album Whatever. As a solo artist Mann made a name for herself and then founded her own record label, SuperEgo Records. Along the way, Mann forged a powerful new sound driven by her distinctive singing style—stripped-down, folky, acoustic but also forceful and cerebral, exploring psychological themes with dark wit and an eye for the world’s ugliest power plays. She has appeared on many film soundtracks, most notably the score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, with “Save Me” landing her Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Original Song. Mann has also made numerous cameo appearances in films such as The Big Lebowski and TV shows like Portlandia and The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, in which she sang an indelible cover of The Cars’ song “Drive.”
Aimee Mann’s Bio:
In support of her newest release, Queens of The Summer Hotel, Aimee Mann started headlining tour dates this fall and winter include multiple performances at Los Angeles’ Largo at the Coronet and New York’s City Winery. Mann started developing the new music in 2018 when she agreed to write songs for a stage adaptation of Girl, Interrupted, Susannah Kaysen’s memoir about her psychiatric hospitalization in the late 1960s. It was material that Mann understood well, having had her own struggles with mental illness. The resulting music comes together in Queens of The Summer Hotel. The assignment to write songs for someone else’s project offered Manna sense of liberation, freeing her to enter another person’s consciousness and story—and a brand-new set of musical structures—through the lens of Kaysen’s own alienation. Although several different characters narrate the songs, they’re not strictly tied to any narrative. But together, they form a portrait of one woman’s crisis of disassociation as seen through another woman’s eyes.
Mann began her solo career in 1993 with the album Whatever and made a name for herself through her independent success and the founding of her record label, SuperEgo Records. Along the way, Mann forged a powerful new sound driven by her distinctive singing style—stripped-down, folky, acoustic but also forceful and cerebral, exploring psychological themes with dark wit and an eye for the world’s ugliest power plays.
In 2017, Mann released her acclaimed album Mental Illness, which won Best Folk Album at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards. The New York Times proclaimed, “Mental Illness wallows in its troubles, and it’s an exquisite wallow,” while the Los Angeles Times declared “Every doomed syllable is sacred and every tragic rhyme fits, as though each song were a puzzle to which only Mann knows the solution.”
In addition to her solo albums, she has appeared on many film soundtracks, most notably the score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, with “Save Me” landing her Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Original Song. Mann has also made numerous cameo appearances in films such as The Big Lebowski and TV shows like Portlandia and The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, in which she sang an indelible cover of The Cars’ song “Drive.” Other extracurricular activities include performing for President Obama and the First Lady at the White House and starting a Podcast with Ted Leo called “The Art of Process.” For more about Aimee Mann see aimeemann.com.
Jonathan Coulton’s Bio:
In 2004, Jonathan Coulton was a techno-utopian. He had a job coding software, but for fun, he’d written some quirky pop songs—and in a bit of skipping-stone serendipity, he got invited to play them at a tech conference. When he sang the rhapsodic bridge of “Mandelbrot Set”—a gorgeously articulated math equation—the audience jumped to their feet, clapping, and screaming. Afterwards, Coulton watched a speech by Lawrence Lessig, in which the Harvard Law Professor described the Creative Commons: shared art, uploaded online, liberated from traditional copyright. When Coulton walked out into the cold Maine sunshine, he remembers, “It was like my head was on fire. I was like, holy sh#@, something is happening!” Suddenly, anyone could publish music. Between HTML, MP3s, and Paypal, you could build your own label. Podcasts were radio shows. The internet had just begun to blink fully awake, but already it was a tangle of creativity, turning strangers into a community.
Growing up in rural Connecticut, the son of a lawyer and a schoolteacher, Coulton had always been a song geek. He played guitar and recorded originals on a cassette 4-track. He was a regular at midnight-movie shows of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. And he dug the more humane, story-based breeds of pop: The Beatles, Billy Joel, Steely Dan, Crowded House. At Yale, he sang with The Whiffenpoofs. But once he’d graduated, he found that making music was a grind: in 1990s New York, it was all about pasting flyers and begging friends to pay for two “not so good” cocktails. Instead, Coulton got a dot-com gig, building databases. Now, he realized, there was a whole new way to reach an audience. At 34, married, with a newborn daughter, Coulton quit his day job. In 2005, he launched the Thing-A-Week Project, sparking a burst of productivity that turned him into a cult figure—online-famous, Version 1.0. Along the way, he won a reputation as “the internet music-business guy,” an artist who communicated directly with his audience, having circumvented the kludgy, crumbling music industry.
A decade passed. The world changed—and the internet with it. “I read Omni Magazine. I read Wired Magazine. I knew the internet was going to save us, because it was going to connect us and free us,” says Coulton. “It didn’t happen that way.” Coulton’s album, “Solid State,” is, like so many breakthrough albums, the product of a raging personal crisis—one that is equally about making music and living online, getting older, and worrying about the apocalypse. A concept album about digital dystopia, it’s Coulton’s warped meditation on the ugly ways the internet has morphed since 2004. At the same time, it’s a musical homage to his earliest Pink Floyd fanhood, a rock-opera about artificial intelligence. It’s a worried album by a man hunting for a way to stay hopeful.
Coulton’s last album, “Artificial Heart,” from 2011, was itself a jump away from explicit storytelling, a ferocious, elliptical rock-and-roll album made in collaboration with John Flansburgh of “They Might Be Giants.”
The title track, “Solid State,” which brackets the album, is, Coulton jokes over cocktails in Brooklyn, “a hopeful look at how the internet sucks.” On the one hand, Coulton says, the “solid state” is what our culture used to be, pre-web: unmoving, stable, but also essentially non-communicative. Digital models are more efficient and powerful, but they are also icier, more brittle. “If the internet is this cold digital structure, we are the distortion that gives it warmth.” Or as the song itself puts it, “It’s all messed up, it’s better that way.”
For more about Jonathan Coulton see jonathancoulton.com
Acoustic Café Folk Series 2023/2024
Rachael & Vilray – Sold Out!
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
A section $50
B section $35
C section $20
Aimee Mann with Special Guest Jonathan Coulton
Thursday, February 29, 2024
A section $75
B section $60
C section $45
Marc Cohn
Thursday, April 11, 2024
A section $65
B section $50
C section $35
Spectacular Jazz Series Single Tickets
Samara Joy – SOLD OUT!
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
A section $70
B section $50
C section $30
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Single Tickets
Instrumental Array
March 7, 2024
A section $50
B section $35
C section $20
String Magic
April 18, 2024
A section $50
B section $35
C section $20
St. Cecilia Music Center’s mission is to promote the study, appreciation and
performance of music to enrich the lives of West Michigan residents.
The Center fulfills this mission by
presenting visiting world-class artists in concert,
providing music education for all ages through our School of Music and
preserving a historic building for musical activities and community event.
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