Aimee Mann's songs have a literary quality to them—sharp, spare short stories set to music—so it was probably inevitable that she would one day make a concept album, the musical equivalent of a novella. The Forgotten Arm, her fifth solo release, is exactly that: a dozen songs that tell, rather loosely, the story of John and Caroline as they meet, fall in love and road trip across America.

Produced by singer-songwriter Joe Henry, The Forgotten Arm is a departure for Mann in several ways, not least of which that it was recorded over just five days last summer. It is Mann’s most straightforward rock record to date. Mann has also taken to writing songs on the piano for the first time and that, too, has affected her sound. “I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor,” she says. In the end though, The Forgotten Arm is, like so much of Aimee Mann’s music, really about the inexorable pull of co-dependency in human relationships.