Songwriter Aimee Mann [ tickets ] recently released her fifth solo album, "The Forgotten Arm," on her own SuperEgo Records label, and she's made a couple notable changes from previous critically acclaimed efforts.

First and foremost, "The Forgotten Arm" is a concept album about a state-fair boxer who falls in love, travels across the country with the object of his affection, and battles his demons until a rocky finish. "The guy's a Vietnam vet and a boxer," Mann explains in her record-company bio, "but he's also a drug addict, and she's trying to get away from the dead-end world where she lives in the South. They run off together and wind up in a casino town like Reno or Vegas, and their relationship falls apart." The record's cinematic qualities no doubt owe some part to Mann's Oscar-nominated music that appeared in the movie "Magnolia."

Another difference from previous albums is the consistency of sound (overseen by producer Joe Henry), the result of a conscious effort to record things more organically, with less overdubbing and studio trickery.

Mann spoke with liveDaily while preparing for her summer tour.

liveDaily: When did you first pick up the guitar?

Aimee Mann: I started playing guitar when I was 12. I had gotten sick. I had mono, so I was sick for three weeks, and was just bored out of my mind. One of my brothers had a guitar that was sitting in the closet, so I liberated it and started teaching myself how to play. I mean, really basic--I'm not really much of a guitar player. I just learned chords from the little chord shapes in songbooks.

Who was having an effect on you at that time?

Elton John and Neil Young. I remember those were the two songbooks I was trying to learn songs out of.

I understand you went to Berklee School of Music in Boston as a bassist, and what happened? I've heard horror stories from other musicians.

It was kind of a different experience for me, and I also think Berklee is a different school than it used to be. It was a real jazz school when I went, and I really didn't go for that reason. Actually, I went to a seven-week summer session that was open to anyone who wanted to go. And because I did well in that, I was able to get into the school proper, and I went for about three more semesters.

For me, it was really good, because it was the kind of place where you could start as a beginner and just learn, and if you learned really quickly, you could skip up to whatever level you had progressed to. Which is nice. You could keep working at whatever level of difficulty you were interested in. I liked that, I was happy to work hard. I wanted to learn ... because I thought maybe if I learned some stuff about music, then I would know if I had any talent or not. Maybe that would make it clear. I sort of sung a little bit, and played a little bit of guitar, but I didn't really know what I was doing, and didn't understand songwriting.

And I found that you could improve. If you practiced the bass and ear training, your ear would get better, and your understanding of how music worked would get better, and your understanding of arrangements would get better--that it wasn't this magic thing, it was something you could practice and work at.

How do you think your songwriting evolved through the '90s? What were the significant plateaus?

I think it just progressed. In ['80s new-wave group] 'Til Tuesday, I just wrote songs on the bass. [laughs] So I think switching to a six-stringed instrument probably helped, because then you have a full chord, and also, just by its nature, the things you write tend to be a little bit more folk-oriented. So, switching from bass to acoustic guitar kind of left the whole new-wave, dance-pop era behind.

I don't know, I think that the more I wrote, the better I got. At least I hope that was the case. Like anything, it responds to practice and repetition, and just doing it for a while. Just being around and hearing things over and over, and going "that's a bit of a cliche, I'm going to avoid that," and getting away from the initial thing of writing lyrics that sound like other songs, and trying to find your own way of saying things.

And now it seems like you're taking a chance, in a filmic-concept way, with "The Forgotten Arm." Where did the first nuggets come from?

I think that my last record had a lot of themes that tied in with each other. I'd gotten a lot of comments like, "This is practically a concept album." So I gradually started thinking, as I was writing songs, that, once again, we're clustered around similar themes. I thought, "You know, maybe I should just write a concept album," and kind of dispense with this idea of trying to make each song be completely different, which I'm not really that interested in. If there's something that I'm interested in writing, I like to write about it a lot, or I like to write about different aspects of it.

What are your touring plans right now?

We'll be up and running in a couple of weeks. Probably a summer tour--three weeks in the States and three weeks in Europe--and then a break, so I can renew my license and do my laundry. [laughs] We've already played some of the new songs live, and the band sounds fantastic.