Save Me (Magnolia)

Aimee Mann writes the internal monologue of someone who has correctly diagnosed their own hopelessness and is asking for rescue anyway. Musically it's deceptively plain: a slow, patient two-chord rock of acoustic guitar and Jon Brion's warm analog keyboards, a lazy tambourine, bass playing simple root motion — everything arranged to leave a huge amount of air around the voice. Mann's delivery is famously unhysterical, a flat sweet alto that refuses to sell the emotion, letting the melody's slow upward reach on "save me" do the pleading. The lyric catalogs the freaks and the ones who have "no talent for the straight and narrow," and its central image — someone hidden in the middle of a room, in plain sight, unfound — is one of the great descriptions of loneliness inside company. It's inseparable from *Magnolia*: Paul Thomas Anderson wrote much of the film from Mann's songs rather than the reverse, and this closed it, an Oscar nominee that lost. Culturally it's the peak of late-90s literate American songwriting, adult and unmarketable. Listen alone, late, when you're too tired to perform being fine — it doesn't console so much as sit next to you.