Mann also paints and makes comics, and has appeared in film and television series including The Big Lebowski, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Steven Universe, The West Wing and Portlandia.

[1] Mann's father, a marketing executive,[2] hired a private detective, who brought her back from England a year later to a new stepmother and two stepbrothers.

"[4] In 1978,[5] feeling she did not fit in the "normal world",[4] Mann enrolled in Berklee College of Music in Boston to study bass guitar.

The single "Voices Carry" reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100[12] and won that year's MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist.

The Washington Post described her as "a neo-punk pop princess, a new wave glamour girl, all doe eyes, gangly limbs and spiky bleached hair with that long, braided tail snaking out from underneath".

[19] According to Pitchfork, while Mann's solo albums demonstrated she was "a witty, self-possessed songwriter", she was still failing to meet commercial expectations, with sales in the low six figures.

[14][23] Dick Wingate, the executive who signed 'Til Tuesday to Epic, described Mann as "the model of an artist who has been chewed up and spit out by the music business".

[28] Later in the decade, Mann became a regular act at Largo, a Los Angeles nightclub that hosted performances from alternative songwriters including Brion, Elliott Smith, Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright.

[40] In 2001, Mann sued Universal Music over the release of a greatest-hits compilation, The Ultimate Collection, which she had not authorized and considered "substandard and misleading".

[41] The Boston Globe characterized the lawsuit as one of several challenges to major labels by female musicians that year, including Courtney Love and the Dixie Chicks.

[45] Paste described it as "another marvelous collection of Mann's intimate portraits of lost love and broken people, all set to a wry pop soundtrack that often lilts at the precise moment that one would expect dour melancholy".

[64] In the same year, Mann contributed vocals to Steve Vai's album The Story of Light on "No More Amsterdam" and recorded the song "Two Horses" for the soundtrack of the film Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie.

[78] In March 2017, Mann released her ninth solo album, Mental Illness, a collection of sparse acoustic songs featuring collaborations with the songwriters Jonathan Coulton and John Roderick.

[84] In January 2018, Mann appeared in an episode of the FX series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story as a bar singer, performing the 1984 Cars song "Drive".

Mann had developed the songs for a musical based on the memoir with the producers Barbara Broccoli and Frederick Zollo, which was canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Donald Fagen, the co-founder of Steely Dan, denied rumors that he felt a female singer-songwriter would not suit their audience, and instead said Mann was not a good musical fit.

[90] In January 2025, Mann organized a fundraiser for her longtime producer Paul Bryan, who lost his home and recording studio in the Palisades Fire.

[79] The journalist Jon Pareles described Mann as a "formalist of pop songwriting" whose "verses, choruses and bridges arrive in their proper places and melodies trace a measured, symmetrical rise and fall".

[97] The New York Times critic Ben Ratliff wrote of Mann's "urbane pop songs, melodically rich and full of well-worn sayings fitted into spiky couplets".

[8] On her first solo albums, Mann and the producer Jon Brion created a sound the Stereogum writer Doug Bleggi called "LA alternative".

[19] She felt that record companies attempted to "remove everything that's interesting" from her songs, and concluded: "My music is not going to sell outside a certain audience, so why not leave it alone so you don't alienate the people who actually like it?

"[18] Writing for the New Yorker in 2000, Nick Hornby wrote that Mann was "a fine, occasionally brilliant singer-songwriter, nothing more, nothing less, and this plainness of purpose has cost her dearly over the last fifteen, mostly calamitous, years".

[34] He said she had not found wider success as she did not meet expectations for female singer-songwriters: "She is not one of the lads, like Sheryl Crow; she is outspoken rather than introspective, which means that she has little in common with the Carole King school; and she is much too grown-up and circumspect to want to bare her pain in the way that Tori Amos and Fiona Apple do.

[99][100] Robin Hilton of NPR wrote that she was "vastly underrated" and had "a real gift for piercing the heart of something, revealing instead of telling and wrapping it all up in inspired melodies".

[10] In Pitchfork, Chris Dahlen wrote of Mann's skill in writing about dark subjects without self-pity, and in using specific imagery to carry general meanings.

[79] In Paste, Dave Sims wrote that "Mann's first-person protagonists invariably find themselves on the raw end of a doomed romance, ducking out under a smokescreen of half-mumbled mea culpas and a cloud of fatalism".

"[80] In the New York Times, Nate Chinen wrote that "the sugarcoated poison pill is a reliable device for Aimee Mann, a singer-songwriter given to ravaging implication and dispassionate affect".

[34] Hornby noted that some found Mann's "self-righteous sense of grievance" irritating, such as the author Greil Marcus, who wrote that she was "still whining after all these years".

"[103] Mann said Steely Dan was "the one band that I 100% love, with no reservations",[93] and cited Fiona Apple, Leonard Cohen, Stephen Sondheim and Jimmy Webb as artists she admires.

"[79] In 2008, Mann said she had attended Al-Anon, a support group for the families and friends of alcoholics, to deal with the exhaustion she felt from trying to help addicts she knew.