Aimee Allen finds her own Little Happiness

By Joelle Caputa
Published: July 14th, 2009 | 7:00am

Aimee Allen is on a mission. One that makes people feel less alone — bringing beauty where there is none, light where there is darkness, love where there is hatred, and understanding to the people who the world thinks are mad.

“I'm not so disillusioned that I think I can save or change the world,” says the Grammy-nominated songstress and former co-host of the “Suicide Girls” radio show. But she can still hope to heal injustice through her music.

On her new album, A Little Happiness (Side Tracked Records), Los Angeles–based Allen is at her most vulnerable and beautiful. The rage that fueled her 2003 supposed-to-be debut, I'd Start a Revolution If I Could Get Up In the Morning, — which remains unreleased due to the Elektra–Atlantic Records merger — and even her 2007 collaboration with Unwritten Law frontman and former boyfriend, Scott Russo (Scott & Aimee: Sitting In a Tree) is long gone.

The girl who roared, “I won’t be your queen for just one day / Got so much fucking fuel that you can't stop my fire!” on the Independent Music Award–winning Scott & Aimee song, “Miss America,” is now the woman who croons “I’m just like you, I bleed / Sometimes it hurts so bad that I can’t breathe” on Happiness’ “Lean Into Me.”

“I've understood over time that love, not hate, is the solution to most problems... including songwriting. I've suffered a lot of loss and tragedy in my life (like most people on the planet) and I spent a lot of time, in my music, screaming about it all. But kinda like a good cry, I'm all screamed out,” explains Allen.

A former Catholic school girl (“Catholic teachers and priests got a lot of hard questions from me,” Allen reveals), she began writing songs about sycamore trees and her father at the mere age of eight. “I just want to do what God put me here to do, and hopefully it works out better for everybody,” she says.

Favoring simplicity, Allen shares that, this time around, “I found the louder the guitar, the less intimacy the lyric had. I couldn't even have metal strings on my guitars. The entire record is all nylon because anything metal was like eating tinfoil to me.”

She even scrapped the original live, full-band studio sessions and re-recorded the entire album, focusing on each instrument individually over a six-month period with co-producer Ryan Atkins.

Much of the time spent recording Happiness was also a period of recovery for Allen. After a random gang assault in L.A. left her with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Allen tells, “I had to get out of L.A. for a minute of peace and quiet.” Thus, she headed to Indiana. There, Allen confides that Beth Hohlier, her label president and second mom, “took me under her wing and nursed me back to health.”

Allen opens up about putting the incident behind her, “Basically, for about six months after any violent attack, you feel like you're about to die. The chemicals in your brain go into survival mode. You can't sleep, and you can't stop being afraid about every little thing. Slowly but surely, it gets better. It's been a very long process and it's taken a lot of spiritual, mental, and physical work.”

When she sings, “I hit rock bottom,” on “A Change In the Weather,” she’s literally describing her life.

It’s safe to say that Allen encountered some of her darkest moments leading up to Happiness’ release, and her writing has been a salvation. “I sit down and write when I'm feeling my most inconsolable. Sometimes, my celebratory lyrics are my hopes and dreams of reality, not actually reality. Some of it is putting on a strong face, despite feeling completely defeated.”

One such track is lead single, “On Vacation.” It’s Allen’s sunshine day, proclaiming, “Everything is cool now that you are gone / I don’t cry about you anymore / I’m so much better than I was before,” while smiling. Ladies everywhere still wondering why he’s “just not that into you” should take note of Allen’s message — you don’t need him to be happy!

Much of Allen’s own happiness is found in her leading lady, Daisy. A proud canine mom, she shares that her German Shephard mix “makes me so happy I can't even tell you. I did this bio-feedback thing with a doctor, and the thing hooks up to your finger and monitors what makes you happy and sad. Anyway, scientifically speaking, my dog was the one thing that made me really happy.”

So does the song “Santeria,” by Sublime. That’s why she chose to record her own version of it on this record. “It's the story of my life,” says Allen, who stripped down the song and introduced a ukulele to the emotional lyrics.

We may not have a crystal ball, but we’ve got a feeling Aimee Allen is gonna make it, and find that love of her own while she’s at it.

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