FEATURE:
Fast as You Can
PHOTO CREDIT: Rick Kern/WireImage
The Return of Fiona Apple
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TOMORROW is going to be a great day…
PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
as Fiona Apple returns with her long-awaited album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters. The reviews will start pouring in, and many are expecting this to be among the best and finest-received albums of this year. Apple has always received huge love from critics, and it seems like her fifth studio album will be golden. It has been eight years since The Idler Wheel… and many were asking whether Apple would give us an album anytime soon. It is a great time to release new material, as many more of us are picking up albums and investigating music. Not to say Apple has a captive audience; there will be even more eyes and ears trained her way. I am not sure what the album feel will be on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, but Apple is one of the most original and intoxicating songwriters in the world. Even on her 1996 debut, Tidal, we knew Apple was something special! Apple was a teenager when that album came out, but songs such as Shadowboxer, Sleep to Dream, and Criminal are so compelling; like they have come from an artist much older and experienced. It is testament to her talent and authority that her debut is so memorable and timeless. My favourite album of hers is 1999’s When the Pawn..., which contains the tracks, Paper Bag, and Fast As You Can. If you need to know where to start with Fiona Apple, here is a guide regarding her albums. Although she releases albums rarely, when they do arrive, you get something otherworldly and peerless.
Apple is not someone who courts media attention, so it is a treat when she does provide interviews. I want to bring in a recent interview from The New Yorker. I will source a few passages that really stuck out. We learn more about Fetch the Bolt Cutter’s title origins, and how Apple reacted to fame:
“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is a reference to a scene in “The Fall,” the British police procedural starring Gillian Anderson as a sex-crimes investigator; Anderson’s character calls out the phrase after finding a locked door to a room where a girl has been tortured. Like all of Apple’s projects, this one was taking a long while to emerge, arriving through a slow-drip process of creative self-interrogation that has produced, over a quarter century, a narrow but deep songbook. Her albums are both profoundly personal—tracing her heartaches, her showdowns with her own fragility, and her fierce, phoenix-like recoveries—and musically audacious, growing wilder and stranger with each round. As her 2005 song “Extraordinary Machine” suggests, whereas other artists might move fast, grasping for fresh influences and achieving superficial novelty, Apple prides herself on a stickier originality, one that springs from an internal tick-tock: “I still only travel by foot, and by foot it’s a slow climb / But I’m good at being uncomfortable, so I can’t stop changing all the time.”
Apple knows the cliché about early fame—that it freezes you at the age you achieved it. Because she’d never had to toil in anonymity, and had learned her craft and made her mistakes in public, she’d been perceived, as she put it to me ruefully, as “the patron saint of mental illness, instead of as someone who creates things.” If she wanted to keep bringing new songs into the world, she needed to have thicker skin. But that had never been her gift.
It seems that Fetch the Bolt Cutters has formulated and grown through various different stages. Maybe the initial stages were sporadic and not quite as productive as Apple hoped but, soon enough, things started to come together:
Once Apple returned to Venice Beach, she finally began making headway, rerecording and rewriting songs in uneven intervals, often alone, in her former bedroom. At first, she recorded long, uncut takes of herself hitting instruments against random things; she built these files, which had names like “metal shaker,” “couch tymp,” and “bean drums,” into a “percussion orchestra,” which she used to make songs. She yowled the vocals over and over, stretching her voice into fresh shapes; like a Dogme 95 filmmaker, she rejected any digital smoothing. “She’s not afraid to let her voice be in the room and of the room,” Garza said. “Modern recording erases that.”
But Apple brightened whenever she talked about writing lyrics, speaking confidently about assonance and serendipity, about the joy of having the words “glide down the back of my throat”—as she put it, stroking her neck—when she got them exactly right. She collects words on index cards: “Angel,” “Excel,” “Intel,” “Gel.” She writes the alphabet above her drafts, searching, with puzzle-solver focus, for puns, rhymes, and accidental insights.
The new songs were full of spiky, layered wordplay. In “Rack of His,” Apple sings, like a sideshow barker, “Check out that rack of his! / Look at that row of guitar necks / Lined up like eager fillies / Outstretched like legs of Rockettes.” In the darkly funny “Kick Me Under the Table,” she tells a man at a fancy party, “I would beg to disagree / But begging disagrees with me.” As frank as her lyrics can be, they are not easily decoded as pure biography. She said, of “Rack of His,” “I started writing this song years ago about one relationship, and then, when I finished it, it was about a different relationship.”
If one listens back to Apple’s previous albums, there are striking and angry lyrics alongside vulnerability, huge intellect and beautiful sentiment. It seems that Apple, even this far into her career, still has the ability to stir the senses and catch people off guard with some pretty evocative lyrics:
Some of the new material was strikingly angry. The cathartic “For Her” builds to Apple hollering, “Good mornin’! Good mornin’ / You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.” The song had grown out of a recording session the band held shortly after the nomination hearings of the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; like many women, Apple felt scalded with rage about survivors of sexual violence being disbelieved. The title track came to her later; a meditation on feeling ostracized, it jumps between lucidity and fury. Drumsticks clatter sparely over gentle Mellotron notes as Apple muses, “I’ve been thinking about when I was trying to be your friend / I thought it was, then— / But it wasn’t, it wasn’t genuine.” Then, as she sings, “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long,” her voice doubles, harmonies turning into a hubbub, and there’s a sudden “meow” sound. In the final moments, dogs bark as Apple mutters, “Whatever happens, whatever happens.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Beatrice De Sea/The New York Times/Redux
Late one afternoon, Apple talked about the album’s themes. She said, of the title, “Really, what it’s about is not being afraid to speak.” Another major theme was women—specifically, her struggle to “not fall in love with the women who hate me.” She described these songs as acts of confrontation with her “shadow self,” exploring questions like “Why in the past have you been so socially blind to think that you could be friends with your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend by getting her a gift?” At the time, she thought that she was being generous; now she recognized the impulse”.
By the time this feature goes online (16th April), there will be one or two reviews regarding Fetch the Bolt Cutters. I am looking forward to its release on 17th April, as it is one of the most anticipated albums for many years. It is wonderful to see albums put out into the world, in spite of the fact we are in lockdown and it is very strange. Whilst we have scheduled albums for the next few months, I am not sure how many artists will delay and hold things back until the autumn. I think Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a sizeable event, as it marks a return of one of the greatest songwriters of her generation. The digital release happens tomorrow (17th), and I am not sure when the physical release will arrive – keep your eyes peeled. What a joy to have back to the musical forefront…
A very special talent.