Aimee Mann has a devout following in Brooklyn, and her annual Christmas show at Music Hall of Williamsburg draws an audience of repeat offenders - myself included - who have been to the same show, with a rotating cast of guest stars, over the years. I've shot photos at this event for two, maybe three years now, and she never disappoints. This year, Liz Phair was on stage for most of the show, and Mann's longtime collaborator John Roderick (The Long Winters) got to rock out to the end lines of her most well known work, "Voices Carry" ('Til Tuesday).
Shooting her shows hooks me right in. From the stage front at her shows (or, alternately, behind the line of audience members who've camped out there hours earlier to get stage-side), I'm close to the action, within the range of eye contact and shutter noise, which during noisier shows is never an issue, but at a show like this I'm careful to time my shots around the periodic quiet interludes. Also, I block my shots, knowing that I only need one, maybe two, winning frames of a particular positioning.
Aimee is talented, down-to-earth, intensely focused and unabashedly bitter - the perfect warm up for the holidays.