Indie-rock icon Aimee Mann is well acquainted with trauma and the transformative act of using it as a basis for artistic expression, but that doesn’t mean that she knows how or why it works. Mann goes on a journey of discovery to better understand the link between damage and why what we do with it matters.
These are her Words + Music.
In Straw into Gold, Mann partners with actor, comedian, and creator of the popular podcast Dead Eyes, Connor Ratliff, to lead a small group of artists through a series of intimate, often funny, and always enlightening conversations about the relationship between the bad things that happen to us and the art that can result from them.
Listeners of Straw into Gold will delight in new renditions of songs from beloved albums including Whatever and Charmer, as well as many newer songs from Mann’s 2021 studio album Queens of the Summer Hotel, soon to appear in Mann’s upcoming Broadway musical adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s seminal novel Girl, Interrupted–which served as a primary inspiration behind the explorations in Straw into Gold.