I did not like the first ‘Til Tuesday (or Aimee Mann) album. I still think it is amazingly weak and have no idea why it managed to be their only album that took off. It was their second album, Welcome Home, that grabbed my attention. I first noticed “What About Love” and thought it was really good. But then I heard the title track and I knew that this was a really great pop band. I still remember a great — really long — line from the chorus of the song, “But anything I could have said I felt somehow that you already knew.” You don’t much hear that kind of profundity in pop music. I love the idea of a dying relationship where you want to say so much but you know it is pointless. Basically, you’d just be saying, “Love me!”

On that album was a song that I especially liked, “David Denies.” It is a woman not listening to the advice offered in “Welcome Home.” She is in a relationship with a man who is on the verge of going back to the woman who dumped him. One thing that is true of most songwriters is that they will rework the same notion in different songs. This is what Mann has done with a number of themes. And that is what she did with the “you are going back to that bitch who dumped you” theme in “David Denies.” Here is one version of it off her 2005 solo album, The Forgotten Arm, “She Really Wants You.” I don’t like it nearly as much, but it is still a fine song. Here she is performing it on Late Show With David Letterman: