Four years after the release of her Grammy-winning album “Mental Illness,” Aimee Mann has shared a new single, the stirring, beautiful waltz “Suicide Is Murder,” from her forthcoming 10th solo album “Queens of the Summer Hotel.” The accompanying music video reunites Mann with actor James Urbaniak, who previously starred in the video for Mann’s “Patient Zero” with Bradley Whitford. Watch the “Suicide Is Murder” music video above.
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Some shots may seem eerily familiar as the video nods to lauded films of the 1960s and 1970s. Rob Hatch-Miller, who co-directed the video with Puloma Basu, took to Twitter to highlight some of their inspirations. The video’s final shot draws on the Oscar-nominated “The Sterile Cuckoo,” which earned bids for Best Actress Liza Minnelli and Best Original Song. The haunting shot of Mann’s female specter walking the halls of a house in a red coat references the BAFTA-winning “Don’t Look Now,” which stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as grieving parents of a young girl who drowned. Like Urbaniak’s character, Sutherland’s John also thinks he sees an apparition of his daughter, who was wearing a red coat when she passed.
The cinematic references in the video are not only thematically resonant, but Mann’s whole “Queens of the Summer Hotel” album is also inspired by Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir “Girl, Interrupted,” which chronicles her time in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s. The memoir was famously adapted into the 1999 film of the same name, directed by two-time Oscar-nominee James Mangold. The film netted Angelina Jolie Oscar, Screen Actors Guild, and Golden Globe Awards for Supporting Actress. Mann wrote the song cycle for a stage adaptation of Kaysen’s work, but its theatrical development has been on hold due to the pandemic.
Though “Queens of the Summer Hotel” will not be eligible for the 2022 Grammys, Mann could enter “Suicide Is Murder” in the upcoming contest for Best Music Video. Mann has never earned a nomination in that category, but she has an increasingly strong track record with the recording academy with six career nominations. Her first three were all earned in 2000 for her contributions to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “Magnolia,” with two bids for her standout song “Save Me” and one for the soundtrack as a whole. Five years later she won her first prize for the package design of her noir concept album “The Forgotten Arm,” nabbed another package nomination for “@#%&*! Smilers” in 2008, and most recently took home the Best Folk Album award for “Mental Illness” in 2017. The smart and moving visual cues in the video could help Mann extend this streak before the album contends in 2023.
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