Thanks to the global memory bank that is YouTube, we can all enjoy the boppy little 1981 single "Give Me Your Face." It's a cut off the album Bark Along With the Young Snakes, recorded, not surprisingly, by a Boston post-punk outfit called The Young Snakes. It's an enjoyable tune, with a lead singer whose voice surely nags at our pop-culture consciousness. Where have we heard her before? Actually, we heard her after. She's none other than Berklee College of Music dropout Aimee Mann, four years from radio stardom and a 30-plus-year career that never fails to astonish and impress.

Mann met and began dating Michael Hausman at Berklee; they formed the new-wave band 'Til Tuesday in 1983. (Dictionaries insist on the spelling "‘Till Tuesday," but the '80s were an innocent time.) Two years later, their song and video "Voices Carry," inspired by their dissolution as a couple, became ubiquitous on MTV. Second and third albums didn't sell as well, however, and Mann went solo for 1993's Whatever. Robert Dimery included it in his reference work 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Mann released her second outing, I'm With Stupid, in 1995.

Her friendship with director-screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson inspired a well-received 1999 film, Magnolia. Her music doesn't merely appear in that movie; its characters quote lyrics and sing along with her songs. One such piece, "Save Me," was nominated for an Oscar but lost to a ballad from Disney's Tarzan. As a result, Mann occasionally dedicates live performances of "Save Me" to Phil Collins. A few songs from Magnolia appear on her third solo album, Bachelor No. 2 or the Last Remains of the Dodo (2000), hailed by Metacritic as one of the best albums of the 2000s.

Now fully independent, Mann puts out an album every year or two. They're all terrific. Her lyrics have a sort of inevitability, in that the second line of each rhyme becomes the ideal fulfillment of its setup. Consider, for example, "The Moth," which observes, "Nothing fuels a good flirtation / like need and anger and desperation." In 2014, she and Ted Leo recorded The Both, an album characterized by Spin as "the best thing either artist has ever done."

With all that amazing music, it's doubly surprising that Mann may be most familiar to young readers as an occasional actress. A year before Magnolia, the Coen brothers cast her as a German nihilist in The Big Lebowski; she's the poor sap who loses a pedicured toe. She performed her own songs on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (muttering, "I hate playing vampire towns") and a James Taylor cover on The West Wing. In a memorable turn, she played herself for the Portlandia episode "Aimee," cleaning houses to keep body and soul together. "The music industry's in the toilet," Carrie Brownstein infers.

However you know Aimee Mann, her appearance at Tacoma's Broadway Center for the Performing Arts is big news. She's joined by Billy Collins, a poet and professor who served as the U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003. His poem The Names was read before a special joint session of Congress in response to 9/11, and he's since made numerous appearances on A Prairie Home Companion. He met Mann five years ago, at a literary event hosted by President Obama. "We met at the White House," Mann explained sheepishly to Sonoma County's Press Democrat, "which is a sentence I may never utter again."

AIMEE MANN & BILLY COLLINS, 7:30 p.m., Friday, April 22, Pantages Theater, 901 Broadway, Tacoma, $29-$79, 253.591.5890