Aimee Mann composed the songs on her new album, @#%&! Smilers, as though they were stories written by a novelist.

The title of alt-pop singer-songwriter Aimee Mann's latest album, @#%&! Smilers, is a nod to those really irritating people who walk down the street and tell you to "turn that frown upside down," when you just don't feel like it.

"This friend of mine and I used to read this newsgroup that was called altbitter and it was all people who were bitter about life, and one of the threads in the newsgroups was called F---ing Smilers," Mann, 47, said during a recent stop in Toronto to promote @#%&! Smilers, which hit stores earlier this month. Mann opens for Squeeze at the Kool Haus Aug. 18.

"And it was people who were irritated at other people coming up to them and telling them to smile. And so I always really liked that. It's a total imposition. If anything, whether you're smiling or not really should be a personal choice and kind of has nothing to do with anybody else. If they don't like it, they can look away."

Mann said the album title also refers to her "getting accused of being musically too morose, but at the same time I felt like this record was kind of smiley. So it just kind of makes me laugh."

The narrative of her previous album, 2005's The Forgotten Arm, was written as a soundtrack to an imaginary movie. This approach isn't totally surprising, given Mann made her biggest mainstream mark with eight songs on the soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 film Magnolia, which garnered Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy nominations for her song Save Me.

For @#%&! Smilers, Mann -- who is married to fellow singer-songwriter Michael Penn (brother of Sean) -- said she tried to write as a novelist would, telling tales about drug addicts, alcoholics and overprescribing doctors.

"This was more like short stories," she said. "I just wanted each song to have its own flavour and its own world."

For example, the new tune Looking For Nothing is about two characters in her local gym -- including a boxer named Canada -- where she has worked out with a boxing trainer for the past five years.

"Canada's a real guy," she said. "He's an ex-fighter, and he's from Canada, that's why they call him Canada. He's got one eye permanently closed and he's snaggle-toothed ... He's very paranoid and he starts to think that people in the gym are conspiring against him, and then he'll suddenly attack them.

"There's probably, like, seven trainers that work there and he must have attacked at least five of them. And then he just got stabbed and he was in ICU and he's back in the gym all stitched up."

She confesses to a general fondness for eccentrics.

"When I meet people and I find they're interesting, I love getting to know them and finding out what they're made of and what makes them tick. I think most people are eccentrics in some way. Who's normal? And it's funny the people that I would have classified as my most normal friends ... As they get older, their relationships get crazier. The secret craziness starts coming out."

Mann is an accomplished musician, having studied music at the Berklee College of Music. She avoided playing guitar on the new album, opting for keyboards instead.

So when she tours she won't be playing guitar.

"Keyboards totally filled the space perfectly, so we're going to stick with that," she said.

Voice carried a little too much

Before Aimee Mann was an acclaimed solo singer-songwriter, she was the frontwoman for '80s New Wave band 'Til Tuesday.

Who could forget the memorable video of their biggest hit, Voices Carry, in which she stood up and defiantly sang in the seats of Carnegie Hall, much to the clearly shown embarrassment of her more conservative boyfriend?

"I actually just did a radio show where they played it, so I was forced to listen to it," Mann said. "I feel like it doesn't have anything to do with my life. It doesn't sound like the way I sing and, obviously, I don't play that kind of music anymore .... It was a long time ago. I feel like it virtually has nothing to do with me.

"It was a way that I was singing, because I had kind of grown up singing in clubs where you couldn't hear yourself, so you kind of shouted a little bit and that's just kind of the legacy of that. I mean, it wasn't really style, it was how it happened. Then once I was in the studio and I could actually hear myself sing on the next record, I changed the way I sang."