On June 19, a week and a half ago, Fiona Apple released a brand new album, her first in seven years. The entire album had been available for streaming by NPR Music for a week and a half by then. Three days later, my copy arrived in the mail. It hasn't left my desk since.
I still haven't listened to it.
Mind you, I've been looking forward to The Idler Wheel... more than maybe any other album this year. Her stunning Boston show in March floored me; it was unquestionably the best concert I've seen in five years, and it took me half a day to recover to a point where I could even listen to other music. Sure, the album's reviews have been breathless and hagiographic, but the prospect of it falling short of expectations – which is always a possibility, though similar reports about her recent performances turned out to be right on target – isn't the issue.
What has kept me from just putting the damn thing in my CD player and pressing "play" is a bit of what I fully accept is compulsive irrationality: I want to hear it so much that I want to make sure that conditions are exactly right the very first time I listen to it, and conditions have not been exactly right. And that is, in a word, stupid.
And I know stupid, because I have my own first-listen music-listening rituals. The first time I play an album, I have to listen to it straight through, with no interruptions, no pausing, no "I'll get to the rest of it later"; if it's 60 minutes long, then I'd better be sure I can carve out an hour for it. If there are lyrics in the liner notes, I'll read along as it plays. What I want, really, is to be able to give it my full, undivided attention.
But for all the romanticizing of the first time we hear an album or a song, that's almost never the moment of its crucial impact. That's not really how music works, not if it can actually hold up beyond that first listen. Unlike books, movies or plays (and television, to a lesser extent), recorded music is consumed repetitively. It's usually anywhere between the second and fifth listen that fragments that maybe weren't evident on first glance suddenly come at you or your brain makes a connection that could only have been made indirectly. That's when a song start to mean something to you.
by Marc Hirsh, NPR | Read more:
Photo: Fiona Apple, by Jack Plunkett/AP
