Aimee Mann’s first gigs in Boston were at now-defunct clubs like Streets and the Rat — places where grunge was more than a description of guitar tones. A willowy blonde who then wore a rat-tail haircut above her blue-green cat’s eyes, Mann stood out in the rock underground as both the singer and the bassist of arty punk outfit the Young Snakes and a fixture behind the counter of the then-sole Newbury Comics store. Even as ’Til Tuesday, her next group, were winning WBCN’s annual Rumble and the attention of major labels, Mann could still be seen punching that register on Newbury Street.

So it went for much of the ’80s, when Bostonians were almost as likely to see Mann on MTV as shopping for used records at Nuggets. And though the late ’80s and the early ’90s brought a series of misadventures with major labels, she was still visible in the audiences of local clubs and even out strolling with then-boyfriend Peter Wolf. But we can’t take Aimee Mann’s presence for granted any more. She left Boston for Los Angeles seven years ago, and it’s no coincidence that her career is in healthier shape than ever. She’s just begun playing concerts to support her new Lost in Space (Superego), and one sign of her current popularity is the venue for her return to Boston this Friday: the Orpheum Theatre.

"It’s huge," she says by phone from the SoHo Grand Hotel in New York City, where she’s been making TV and radio appearances. "I can’t believe we can actually sell any tickets for that thing. I’m really shocked because for years I’ve always been, like, a Paradise act. I remember seeing a solo acoustic show Elvis Costello played there years and years ago."

That’s a fair recollection, since Mann’s recent work has been receiving Costello-like attention. Although her move to LA was prompted by her love for fellow singer-songwriter Michael Penn, the ears of the television and film industries quickly fell in love with the mix of melody and worldliness in her music. In 1995, her "That’s Just What You Are" was drafted for Melrose Place, and that began a streak of soundtrack appearances that included "Wise Up" in Jerry Maguire and nine songs for director P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia.

In 2000, after her Magnolia work was nominated for an Oscar, Mann performed on the Academy Awards broadcast. That combined with the media’s enthusiasm for Bachelor No. 2 (Superego), which came out in May of 2000, has given her the kind of profile she hadn’t enjoyed since ’Til Tuesday’s "Voices Carry" propelled her to the charts and MTV’s summer beach party in 1985.

"Living out here has helped keep my career going," she explains. "It’s so amazing the work you can get just bumping into people. You meet somebody at a club who turns out to be a music supervisor who says, ‘Oh, I’ll put your song in a TV show next week,’ and it happens. I’d left Boston because I met Michael, who has a son and his family out here. So many of my friends had left Boston and already moved to Los Angeles by then that Boston was getting to be a bit of a ghost town for me. And you know how Boston is — everybody is either 70 or 20, so it can be real hard to find your peer group."

Which, in a sense, brings us to Lost in Space. Most of its 11 songs are small studies in disconnection, from "Humpty Dumpty," the opening tale of an irrevocably fractured relationship, to the self-loathing of "This Is How It Goes" and the obsessive, lonely "It’s Not." These creep deeper into the sore, stinging spots of the psyche than the bittersweet and cynical sadness that’s been a pervasive theme in Mann’s writing. And that sense of distance and isolation most of Lost in Space’s characters possess is underpinned by guitar and keyboard sounds that pull the arrangements away from the Beatlesque pop classicism that’s been a mainstay of her recordings since her 1993 solo debut, Whatever (Imago), and toward psychedelic rock.

Mann explains that the dark and stormy tales of Lost in Space, in which references to drug abuse and other compulsive behaviors abound, are more the result of her taste in reading than anything else. "I’m really interested in the human brain, so for quite a while now I’ve been reading about the brain and psychiatry and everything in-between. I’m interested in people and how they work, and in general I’m interested in self-awareness. I go to therapy, and for me there’s a big incentive in trying to be really self-aware. I want to act as a conscious person.

"I’m trying to formulate my own unified-field theory about the human mind and human behavior. I believe there’s no difference between brain chemistry and human emotions. If you experience emotions, you’ll experience a change in brain chemistry. I’ve read studies that prove childhood trauma triggers measurable changes in the brain. And I think the subconscious wants to tell the story, even if someone can’t consciously tell the story. That’s why somebody who was molested as a child will often act in a sexually inappropriate way — become a sex addict or a prostitute, or be sexually avoidant.

"Personally, I don’t want to be somebody who acts from out of the subconscious. That’s very out-of-control behavior. So that’s why I do a lot of reading about addiction and brain trauma, and it really brings me a greater understanding of other people. Even the more extreme cases of people who are drug addicts and have problems with compulsive behavior that might seem inexplicable."

All this is reflected in Mann’s lyrics, in which people drink alone in gray-hued rooms and seek a peaceful place they can find in their minds. She also wanted the sound of the album to portray "the themes of feeling isolated, where you feel like you’re living in kind of a surreal meta-world." Producer and guitarist Michael Lockwood made that his mission, and he created a sonic membrane of shifting and shimmering textures that’s the album’s aural glue. It’s evident right from the wobbly guitar melody that opens the disc and the sci-fi-film chips that begin "Pavlov’s Bell," which might just be the album’s best track, what with Mann’s vocal and a catchy chorus that’s reinforced by crunchy rhythm guitar, alien slide lines, and other flourishes. If the pervasive sonic canvas seems all guitars, that’s probably because the array of cheap, second-hand Casio keyboards Lockwood used were run through a menagerie of guitar-effects pedals.

Then there’s the packaging. As those familiar with "Ghost World" (from Bachelor No. 2) might guess, Mann is a fan of graphic novels and independent comics, and in particular of the gray worlds of Ghost World author Daniel Clowes and his lesser-known peer Seth, who pens the Palooka-Ville comics. Seth’s drawings, including a four-page narrative, illustrate the 32-page booklet of Lost in Space. She explains, "The muted approach and starkness of his comics, and his characters, are all really similar to the feelings in people in these songs."

Another of her recent interests has been the ignition of United Musicians, a collective formed by Mann, Penn, Bob Mould, and Pete Droge for artists who’ve abandoned the tyrannical grounds of the major labels. "It’s something we’re developing over time for artists who want to put out records on their own. We want to be able to supply distribution, marketing, and other kinds of support that’s hard to get." Eventually, CDs will be issued bearing the United Musicians imprint on their spines, though Mann says there are no plans to transform the organization from collective to label.

Her own Superego imprint is an outgrowth of her thoroughly documented struggles within the major-label system. Mann’s story — how Epic wouldn’t let her out of her contract for five years after the final ’Til Tuesday album; how Imago lost its distributor just as Whatever was released; how her next deal, with Geffen, led to a three-year limbo; and how Interscope, her last major label, felt Bachelor No. 2 wasn’t commercial enough and so held the record until she eventually won a battle to buy it back — has been written so often that she’s become a poster woman for the perils of dealing with major labels. The happy ending, of course, is that when she started selling Bachelor No. 2 over the Internet herself, the demand was so heavy that a distributor asked to put her records in stores and the disc became a modest hit. And now Superego has a life of its own.

"Now I feel more comfortable talking about the major-label thing," she says. "When you’re signed to a label, well . . . like the Michael Jackson thing where he’s calling his label racist for not selling his record. That’s kind of unseemly. There’s a danger of, if you’re not successful, it looking like sour grapes, and if you are successful, it seems like you’re a big fat rock star crying over nothing. Which is . . . well, it looks glamorous, but this is a job and people who are in bands work, and the bigger the star is, usually the harder they work. I had a taste of it in ’Til Tuesday. The major labels will work your ass to the ground.

"Now I feel like I can talk about it with more credibility. Although I am glad that Wilco [who were dropped last year by Reprise for making a "non-commercial" album] have taken up the mantle. They can talk about it for a while, so I don’t have to."

Aimee Mann appears at the Orpheum Theatre this Friday, October 4, at 8 p.m. with opener Juliana Hatfield. Call (617) 931-200 or go to www.ticketmaster.com.