I am biased. Aimee Mann went to my high school. I wasn't aware of this fact until I was 24 and working on the film Magnolia. One of the sound guys brought his nephew to the set who was visiting from out of town. He was wearing a brown and orange Monican t-shirt. Aimee Mann happened to be on set that day and noticed the shirt. She said something along the lines to him, "Midlothian and Monican are high school rivals, and I attended Midlothian." A couple hours later she was gone and I approached him to comment on his shirt, saying basically the same thing. "You're the second person to tell me that today," he said. Crazy. What are the chances? I kept hoping she'd come back to the set before the end of filming, but she never did. A couple months later I worked on a Fiona Apple video with PTA and he was signing Magnolia soundtracks and giving them out to the crew. For the foreseeable future, I bought all of Aimee Mann's music and saw her perform a few times at Café Largo on Fairfax. She was great. All of this happened AFTER Whatever was released and until now, I wasn't super-familiar with this album. Jon Brion was heavily involved in the Magnolia soundtrack and he's here too. Though not as fully formed as her later work, the album has all the hallmarks of the work I know. Reaching vocals against basic distortion, slower acoustic songs with a smattering of samples with a heavy emphasis on her soothing voice. This album was best played in the 1990s in middle-suburbia. Ideally listened to on CD, but definitely in the bedrooms of late-teen-anxty girls who yearn for a life far from Midlothian and closer to Melrose Place.