Aimee Mann, Queens of the Summer Hotel

If a musical version of “Girl, Interrupted” sounds tasteless to you, then Queens of the Summer Hotel, the latest album by Aimee Mann, may not be your cup of tea. Mann announced three years ago that she was writing the songs for a stage adaptation of the 1960s breakdown memoir, but some of those songs have ended up on her new record instead.

So maybe the play isn’t happening after all? Listening to the album, it’s honestly hard to see how it would have worked. Aimee Mann is a deft, sensitive songwriter whose excellent last album, Mental Illness, was a thoughtful collection of songs about various characters, but even she cannot surmount the source material, which simply does not lend itself to the inherent glibness of a stage musical.

You may hear hints of Mann’s vocal greatness on tracks like “You Fall” and “You Could Have Been a Roosevelt,” but the consistency of the orchestral style throughout makes the whole album sound like one long interlude. The catchiest songs are “Burn It Out,” about a woman who set fire to her own face, and “Suicide is Murder,” which notes that if you kill yourself, “Anyone who knew you/ Will be cursed, and part of them will also die,” which can make a person feel a little bit bad about singing along to them.

Most of the music on Queens sounds like it’s straight out of Vince Guaraldi doing “Charlie Brown Christmas,” but the lyrics are about the troubled denizens of a psychiatric ward, including a victim of incestuous assault, who sings about how much “my daddy loves me.” There’s an entire song dedicated to a side character all about shooting speed in Mexico.

There are also two less-than-one-minute-long interstitials called “Check” and “Check (Reprise).” Perhaps they were meant for wordless stage scenes in which nurses are doing perfunctory room checks? The reason for their inclusion is not entirely clear. They’re not even long enough to be considered filler. The album is very short at just over half an hour.

There’s no cohesive narrative holding these songs together; they are mostly introductory character sketches, and it’s hard to see how the whole story of “Girl, Interrupted” could be staged in two hours if it was being told at this glacial pace. It’s possible that Mann reached a similar conclusion and decided to cut her losses and just release what she had so far.

Some of the songs could stand on their own without context, such as “Little Chameleon” and “You Don’t Have the Room,” but when you consider something like “Give Me Fifteen,” a show tune in which a psychiatrist brags about how fast he can diagnose a patient, you have to wonder if Queens is merely the ashes of a failed concept. Mann is a national treasure, but this material is so dark, the songs so specific, and the execution so disjointed that it’s unlikely to find a home in many people’s hearts.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.

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