"You fucked it up," former "Til Tuesday front woman Amiee Mann croons in the opening lines of her stellar second solo album I"m With Stupid. Eat your heart out, David Geffen.

Mann, nominated last year for an Oscar for her passionate ballad "Wise Up," featured on the "Magnolia" soundtrack (a film that writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson built around a lyric from Mann"s "Deathly"), is no stupid songstress. One of the best pop writers in the industry today, Mann flies to the top of her form on this 13 track record, ably backed by L.A. producer/musician wizard Jon Brion.

Songs of love, loss and desperation interweave with stories filled of archetypal characters and smart irony as Mann"s writing bears the influence of the fast glitz of life in Hollywood. "I wish I was both young and stupid/ then I too could have the fall that you did," Mann"s warm voice beckons with a tone of learned hardness from experiences past on "You Could Make a Killing." Her sense of awareness is so keen she follows this up with "Superball," a metaphoric odyssey about the changes of life through the eyes of the round shard of rubber you buy out of a penny machine at Meijer (or Ralph"s, in her case).

Exploring the fun moments as well as the dark times of everyday, Mann is quiet and soft, yet equally rooted in rock and a touch of jazz. With the wonderful quips and pops of a tight percussion arrangement, she spins "Frankenstein," a witty tale of playing god as the creator, an artist. "I won"t find it fantastic or think it absurd/ when the gun in the first act goes off in the third," Mann grins with the honest prophecy of chance and coincidence not to mention a knowledge of perhaps, Linda Seger or Syd Field"s rules of screenwriting.

Mann"s music is pure California post-Beatlesque pop, and always an emotional treat, for better or worse. Three words

"All Over Now."