‘I Just Want to Feel Everything’: Hiding Out With Fiona Apple, Musical Hermit

Fiona Apple was upstairs, alone, stalking the small suite of her boutique hotel in Soho. It was noon, in May, and she had arrived in New York, the city where she grew up, a few days earlier from Paris, where she was shooting a music video. She was at this moment supposed to be sitting in the hotel bar answering questions about her new album and her life in general, a life that, with the exception of sporadic performances — at her hometown club, Largo, in Los Angeles — she keeps almost hermetically sealed. She’d dressed herself in a long black nylon skirt, a tank top, and a thin green hooded sweatshirt; she applied no makeup. She wore her hair tied up. Despite being late, she was consulting her laptop, which she often struggles to operate, typing the words mirror neurons into Google. With a pencil she began scribbling onto a piece of hotel stationery. The morning — which is to say the hours after midnight — had unfolded well, sunrise had come smoothly, she’d felt good, and she’d seriously debated continuing straight through, as she does most often, but with a busy day ahead, she’d figured it best to rest, and, to her surprise, slipped into unconsciousness beneath the coffee table. When she’d awoken at ten, she’d felt different. She’d felt bad. She’d returned to the window she’d spent the morning staring down from, the man clearly on drugs still hobbling along the same block of Grand Street, picking up twigs and moving them. In her head she heard the refrain from the seventies song: “Do it, do it, till you’re satisfied.”

She was, now, exhausted. While she has struggled with sleep since she was a child, it has become in recent years a constant antagonist, to the point where she finds climbing into a normal bed torturous (back home in Venice, California, she and her dog, Janet, often lie down on an air mattress in her backyard). And so it was only natural that sleep, or the lack thereof, would seep into the two other themes — sanity and love — that imbue most of her music, including the first single off her new album, The Idler Wheel … , her fourth in sixteen years and a full seven years since the last. It is called “Every Single Night,” and it is, at least in its simplicity, unlike any single in memory. It begins with a music box striking a ringing C-major chord in slow, plodding four-four time, moving only a few steps up and down from there.

Every single night
I endure the flight
Of little wings of white-flamed
Butterflies in my brain.

These ideas of mine
Percolate the mind
Trickle down the spine
Swarm the belly, swelling to a blaze—

That’s when the pain comes in,
Like a second skeleton,
Trying to fit beneath the skin
I can’t fit the feelings in

Every single night’s a fight
With my brain

There is a very strong argument to be made that Fiona Apple, 34, is the greatest popular musician of her generation. This, on its face, might seem like something of a misnomer, since Apple moves paltry numbers of “units” and is the antithesis of prolific. She also happens to be a longtime critic of the record industry, specifically her employer, Sony Records. (Strictly for comparison purposes, in the six-year span between Apple’s second and third albums, Britney Spears released five CDs, including both her debut and “greatest hits.”) Apple wrote the majority of her first album, Tidal, during adolescence; released in 1996, when she was 18, it was nominated for three Grammys. Her next two — When the Pawn … and Extraordinary Machine, released in 1999 and 2005, respectively—were similarly nominated and appeared atop virtually every top critic’s list of the best albums of the year (Kanye West has said Extraordinary Machine made him want to be the “hip-hop Fiona Apple”). But it is her latest—a stripped-down rhythmical and confessional tour de force—which, in its restraint alone, stands as her strongest work yet.

Her unique musical DNA—fusing jazz and the old standards with a dose of post-sixties singer-songwriter — seems inextricable from her biological one, a line of workman American performers steeped in vaudeville, big band, theater, and cable television. So that, in “Every Single Night,” the lines “Little wings of white-flamed / Butterflies in my brain” come with a slight fluttering; there is a quickening, a crescendo through “Swarm the belly, swelling to a blaze”; until, by the time “That’s when the pain comes in,” her contralto rings, erupting to accent when in an E-flat that, taken out of context, could be Callas’s, not to mention the almost diabolical use of robato to construct a chorus out of “brain,” stretched into ten notes, ten slurring syllables, in what it occurs to me very early one morning later in her living room in California, the two of us altered to the precipice of poisoning, green stars orbiting above us, her extraordinary voice ricocheting across space: musical onomatopoeia.

by Dan P. Lee, Vulture.com |  Read more

Photo: uncredited:
h/t Longreads