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Aimee Mann may not be a "smiler," but nor is she an unhappy artist.

With a catalog of melancholy tunes featuring themes such as drug addiction, alcoholism and "the freaks who suspect they could never love anyone," the singer-songwriter gets tagged by both critics and fans as dark. What they see as dark, though, she sees as uplifting.

"Every now and then people will ask me, 'Why don't you write happier songs?'" she said in a telephone interview from her office in Los Angeles. "But I don't consider my songs depressing. I'm never depressed when I sing them. I think its uplifting when you're really trying to get to the truth of something, even if it's sort of painful. In songs you're always trying to do that in some measure. That's why, for me, they're positive. I sort of feel that it's a fact of life that there are difficult things in life. But when you meet them head on - that's not depressing."

Mann, whose latest album, "@#%&! Smilers," was released earlier this summer, will perform Saturday at the Carolina Theatre. She last played Greensboro in 2006 as part of the Eastern Music Festival.

The title of the album is a dig at those who put smiley faces at the end of e-mails or have a tendency of telling others they should smile more.

"It's this joke I used to have with a friend of mine," she said. "We had come across it a long, long time ago when we first got computers and discovered this newsgroup called alt.bitter, devoted to people who were bitter about various things. And there was this one thread called '(expletive) smilers.' And it was from somebody who was mad about someone that had come up to them on the street saying 'Smile!' And this person was super irate about it. And we just thought it was so funny. Over the years, we would refer to certain people as smilers."

Still, she's not above using emoticons herself when online.

"I'm really into super dumb humor," she said. "When I'm on iChat, I will always send out the dumbest emoticons, like the guy wearing the sunglasses or the money-mouth which never makes any sense. No one understands money-mouth, so I'll just throw him in when he absolutely doesn't make any sense.

That always makes me laugh, just because it's so stupid."

The 47-year-old Mann is best known for the Oscar-nominated "Save Me," which, along with eight of her other songs, appeared in the 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson film "Magnolia." The Midlothian, Va., native also scored a top 10 charting hit in 1985, "Voices Carry," as part of new wave outfit 'Til Tuesday.

She went solo in 1993 with the album "Whatever" and two years later scored another hit with "That's Just What You Are," which appeared on the soundtrack for prime time soap "Melrose Place."

"@#%&! Smilers" is her seventh solo studio album (if one counts her 2006 holiday CD "One More Drifter in the Snow") and is a poppier endeavor than 2005's "The Forgotten Arm," with an emphasis on Wurlitzers and Moog synthesizers. Like her other works, though, it is also a collection of character studies, one of which, "Freeway," is about a friend who was a drug addict for 25 years. Mann said the person the song is based on is now sober, but still struggling with many issues. As the refrain goes he has "a lot of money, but can't afford the freeway."

"The hardest people to get sober are pretty women and rich men, because there so many people around them enabling the behavior, and they're also able to enable the behavior themselves," she said. "So much of hitting bottom for most people is defined by money - the guy who loses his job, has no place to live and winds up on the street. As a rich guy, though, you never really hit bottom. It's hard for some people to tell themselves they've hit bottom when they're wearing Dolce & Gabbana jeans and living in a nice house and driving a nice car."

The subject of drugs pops up in a number of Mann's songs. Though the singer has never had a drug problem herself, she said she can still understand many of the problems addicts go through.

"I have enormous compassion," she said. "Substance abuse has never worked for me, but I know what it's like to be focused on something that you are absolutely convinced will help your life or make you happy or relieve your anxiety, and then be unable to get rid of that idea. I get that."

But like her other albums, "@#%&! Smilers" also has a touch of the quirky with a mixture of keyboards on top of synthesizers and what Mann dubs a "very organic sounding rhythm section." One barroom-style ditty, "Ballantines," named after the classic American brew, came to her in a dream and features Kermit-like vocals and humming from Sean Hayes.

"I have a lot of things in my songs that make me laugh, like musical things or lyrical things" she said. "It's not that they're funny, but they're just whimsical."