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One of the new album’s most powerful songs is “Suicide Is Murder,” a monologue the narrator has about her own suicide attempt. “But I do think that’s relaxing a little bit, and people are starting to take these things more seriously.” It’s all this ridiculous rugged individualism,” she says. “I think the American attitude is that if you have a problem, you should be able to solve it by yourself, that to admit that you have a problem is to be weak. She has often talked of her struggles with depression and anxiety, in part to explode any stigma. Indeed, the album comes four years after her last, “Mental Illness,” which won the Grammy for best folk album. I mean, obviously, the subject matter is something I’m familiar with and I have been interested in for a long time.” Mann called the process an “interesting puzzle” and a challenge. “As an arranger, it was really fun to hang clothes on these songs,” he says. So well thought-out is the album that there are two small interludes - “Check” and its reprise - that mimic the sound of nurses doing repetitive rounds, checking in on the patients. They’re very specific for characters and things that are happening temporally in the play,” he says. “It’s not just a collection of songs loosely based around an idea. For “At the Frick Museum,” he arranged the strings to sound like someone tiptoeing through an empty museum. Mann and her frequent collaborator, producer, arranger and songwriter Paul Bryan, grounded the sound in the pre-hippie 1960s with the flavor of classical music running throughout the orchestration, nods to Chopin and Mozart.īryan helped give the album almost visual cues, like adding maniacal strings to “Give Me Fifteen,” a song sung by a narcistic, misogynist doctor. She got the name from a glib comment from the poet Anne Sexton, who also was treated at McLean Hospital. Mann titled the album “Queens of the Summer Hotel” so it could stand alone from whatever final ”Girl, Interrupted” cast album emerged.
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A mention in the book that the poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell had also been treated at the same psychiatric hospital prompted the song “Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.” “Burn It Out” is about a character who set herself on fire. So “In Mexico” is a portrait of a character in the book who lived in Mexico and shot speed. “My idea was to have each character have a song - sort of like ‘A Chorus Line’ - where each character talks about their own relationship to the overarching theme,” Mann says. Mann, who first gained fame fronting ’Til Tuesday and earned an Oscar nod for her work on the “Magnolia” soundtrack, started with the book, marking passages she thought would make interesting songs or scenes that could conceivably translate into musical moments. A film starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie followed. The bestselling book, published in 1993, contains vivid portraits of fellow patients and helped push the discussion about how America treats mental illness. “Girl, Interrupted” is about the nearly two years Kaysen spent confined in McLean Hospital, an upscale psychiatric institution in Massachusetts. That’s kind of up to them, but because I’d had so many songs, I was like, ‘Well, now I feel like I have to record them.’” It may just be more like a play with some music. How they get used on stage doesn’t seem to bother the songwriter. While the show’s path to the stage is still up in the air, the songs it inspired have Mann’s signature sardonic humor, wry lyrics, moody melodies and powerful emotional resonance.