Fiona Apple - The ghosts of the "sullen girl"

A young piano prodigy, a fragile and sensual figure, much like her fellow countrywoman Tori Amos, Fiona Apple Maggart proved to be one of the most interesting new talents among female American singer-songwriters. Her dramatic, intimate lyrics bear witness to a difficult, tormented personality, marked by the sexual violence she suffered at just twelve years old. And her intense ballads have highlighted her classy songwriting talent, in the tradition of the likes of Carole King, Suzanne Vega, Sheryl Crow, as well as Amos herself, the most obvious reference point for her work.

Fiona Apple was born in New York on September 13, 1977, the daughter of actor Brandon Maggart and actress Diane McAfee.

The couple also have another daughter, Amber, as well as several children from previous relationships. The two separate when Fiona is four years old. At eight, Apple begins taking piano lessons, quitting two years later to develop her talent intuitively. At eleven she writes her first song. That same year she tells a classmate that she was about to kill herself along with her sister. Then comes the episode of the rape by a stranger, which took place in a garage at her parents' house in New York.

Her artistic rise begins almost by chance: in 1994 a friend plays one of her demo tapes to producer Kathryn Schenker, for whom she was working as a babysitter. Schenker, who has produced the likes of Sting and Smashing Pumpkins, is impressed and gets her a deal with Sony.

Fiona Apple thus makes her debut at just eighteen with Tidal (1996). It's a delicate, intense album that immediately earns major success with both audiences and critics: glowing reviews in outlets like Rolling Stone, Time and The New York Times go hand in hand with a triumphant run on the Lilith Fair Tour and a Grammy Award for "Best New Artist in a Video".

Enriching the album is a handful of melancholy, delicate songs, from the touching piano ballad "Sullen Girl", a kind of self-portrait recalling the most intimate side of Laura Nyro, to the aching hit single "Shadowboxer", from the mournful self-analysis of "Never Is A Promise" and "Pale September" to the anguished elegy of "The Child Is Gone" and the sweet lullaby of "Slow Like Honey". But Apple also finds grit and energy for more rhythmic tracks, like the lively rap of "Sleep To Dream" and the feverish blues of "Criminal". The record moves effortlessly between pop song, jazz, soul and blues, showcasing the full, crystalline talent of the New York singer-songwriter.

But her difficult temperament and her resistance to accepting the rules of a music business in which she would soon find herself trapped make for an uphill climb for the artist swiftly nicknamed "the new Tori Amos". She herself, moreover, seems torn between the fatal attraction of "stardom", which demands she play the sex symbol at all costs (at one concert she will even perform in her underwear), and the artistic ambitions of a contrarian singer-songwriter. "I don't feel appreciated as an artist, but as a good product of my label, which created the illusion that I was beautiful, rich and living a perfect life", she will confess in 1997.

That same year, at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, she takes the stage to accept the Best New Artist Award and sets off an uproar by declaring that "this world is bullshit" and urging the audience to reject celebrity culture. "Go with yourself", she will conclude, almost fiercely, quoting the great Maya Angelou.

Despite the backlash, her career keeps moving forward: Apple receives several Grammy nominations in 1998, while Tidal goes platinum.

In 1999 the new album thus arrives, When The Pawn Hits The Conflicts He Thinks, a shortened version of the impossibly long title originally chosen ("When the pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a king what he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight and he'll win the whole thing 'fore he enters the ring there's no body to batter when your mind is your might so when you go solo, you hold your own hand and remember that depth is the greatest of heights and if you know where you stand, then you know where to land and if you fall it won't matter, cuz you'll know that you're right").

This choice too draws the wrath of the music scene that, until shortly before, had idolized her: "It was a poem I'd written for myself," she will explain. "I knew it would never become a song, but I felt the need to write it to remind myself of all the people who mocked me and were wrong. I needed to remind myself that I hadn't done anything wrong to anyone. My success brought a lot of criticism. It really bothered me, and I wasn't able to hide it. It seems like a lot of people hate me for reasons I just can't understand."

Beyond the controversy, however, When The Pawn doesn't repeat the miracle of Tidal, even if it still holds up well in terms of songwriting and performance. The standout is the ballad "Get Gone", murky and compelling enough to stand alongside Tori Amos's finest moments. The single "Fast As You Can", which recalls the traumatic episode of her rape, rides a syncopated techno-beat rhythm that offers no escape. Fiona engages in other refined acts of self-analysis, reproaching herself for her mistakes ("A Mistake") while acknowledging their inevitability within a process of growth ("I'm gonna make a mistake/ I'm gonna do it in porpouse"). The tides of pain, though, are always lying in wait, and at times become impossible to manage, as she tells us in a hoarse, desperate voice on "To Your Love" ("Please forgive me for my distance/ The pain is evident in my existence"), only to then surrender to the velvety softness of "Love Ridden", another delicate piano ballad in her signature style. The closing act of "I Know" is moving, with a jazz melody and a performance that is more melancholy than ever.

Among her various side projects, Fiona Apple also contributes to the soundtrack of the film "Pleasantville".

The former sullen girl confirms herself as a tender, languid chanteuse of stories steeped in anguish and melancholy, revealing a personality as fascinating as it is fragile — one that on one hand seems to have aged too quickly ("The Child Is Gone", she sang on her debut), and on the other still seems haunted by the ghosts of a confused, tragic adolescence.

A deeply troubled gestation precedes the release of her third album, Extraordinary Machine (2005). Shelved by Sony because it was deemed "not commercial enough" (sic!), the record leaks onto the web: an army of fans, armed with peer-to-peer software, mobilizes to reclaim their idol's work under the banner of "FreeFiona!". Three years later, the album resurfaces, once again under the Sony banner. The casualty this time is original producer Jon Brion, "dropped" by Apple herself in favor of Mike Elizondo, a veteran of the hip-hop scene (Eminem, 50 Cent, Dr. Dre) who had already worked alongside Sheryl Crow and Gwen Stefani. The result is an album heavily reworked compared to the online version, with more conventional arrangements: it's hard not to believe that Brion's "baroque" touch was sacrificed on the altar of reconciliation between Fiona and her label. Whether the original's charm was ruined or enhanced in the process will remain an eternal dilemma to hand down to posterity.

The twelve tracks are bitter slices of a love dissolving (the one between the singer-songwriter and "Magnolia" director Paul Thomas Anderson) and evidence of a personality now far removed from the late-adolescent turmoil of "Tidal". The shadowy girl who in 2000 fled the Roseland stage in New York in tears has sharpened her songwriting, turning it into the mirror of a mature woman who has decided to settle her scores with the past. As mentioned, of the two surviving Brion tracks: the opening title track is a Judy Garland-style number, with Fiona's soft vocals weaving between horns, strings, marimba and bells, in a Hollywood music-hall setting; still in the vein of old-fashioned orchestration, the closing "Waltz (Better Than Fine)" elegantly traces oblique pop trajectories ranging from Van Dyke Parks to Badly Drawn Boy. Apple's robust contralto colors the love story of "Get Him Back" in the darkest shades, alongside a pianistic fervor worthy of the most possessed Cave; it's again the piano's rhythm that drives "O' Sailor", one of her typically dreamy, pathos-laden ballads; while a fine Ben Folds-style solo graces "Not About Love". If on more ordinary pop tracks, such as "Better Version Of Me" or "Red Red Red", Elizondo simply shines the spotlight on the chanteuse at the piano, on "Tympse" he makes the most of his hip-hop verve, with a lopsided gait propelled by near-dance beats. That same rhythmic drive returns in the crescendo of "Window", where the tribute to Tom Waits' tipsy blues is also unmistakable.

Fiona Apple, in short, is still here. Even with a touch less melodic wonder and a voice somewhat roughened by the years. But the suspicion remains that that disowned bootleg, all strings, rage and ghosts, might have been worth much more.

Finally, in 2012, Apple signs an authentic, uncompromising album with Epic Records. A title of epic length (The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do) names a work that the artist recorded entirely without her label's knowledge. Alongside her, also serving as co-producer, is the fascinating multi-instrumentalist Charley Drayton — who has previously worked with, among others, Neil Young, Iggy Pop and Courtney Love. Listening to it is like opening someone else's unsettling secret diary, with no filter between the music and the listener: a dissonant, romantic stream of consciousness, à la Virginia Woolf. Indistinct watercolors, taking shape with every listen.

Petty jealousy, isolation, sadness, bitterness, loneliness, fragility: these are the dark colors that shine in a nocturnal, minimalist, essential landscape, sketched by Apple's ever-present voice-and-piano pairing, and brought to life by Drayton's percussion amid embellishments of unusual instruments such as the bouzouki, the celesta, the marimba and the kora, with overdubs amplifying, into a dizzying chaos, the torments buried in the artist's unconscious. In this limbo of being, as frightening as it is evocative, the lyrics of the prodigious pianist reach their peak intensity, woven into the rhymes of ten dark fairy tales, authentic in their passionate despair.

There's no room here for formal beauty for its own sake: Apple's vocal forays prove as much, utterly foreign to any contrived technical perfection. You hear sighs, murmurs, deliberately jarring notes, screams streaked with rage, tender feminine falsettos, swing-style spoken passages full of sardonic humor — but there's also room for her usual warm, deep sonorities, ready to blossom into melodic patterns of disarming inspiration.

In the video for "Every Single Night", Apple sings of her exhausting attempt to capture "the flight of little wings of white-flamed butterflies" inside her brain. She moves among giant octopuses and brains cut in half, in a vast, dreamlike darkness. Time follows the soul, not a pattern, and it changes, shifts, dances, stops, climbs up little-traveled paths, as on "Jonathan", where Apple recalls a trip taken with her ex-boyfriend.

Again, on a moonless night, the fury and despair of “Daredevil” and “Regret” give way to the irony of “Valentine”, whose lyrics unsettle even the most candid memories, or take on a feverish hunger for life and freedom on the childlike “Anything We Want”. The tender “Werewolf” and the windswept “Periphery” hark back more closely to classic Apple-style ballads. This string of tremendous confessions finally lands on the voluptuous “Hot Knife”, a duet between Apple and her sister Maude Maggart: a choral alchemy that recounts sexuality through sharp knives and pats of butter.

In short, now thirty-five years old, the former child prodigy is back to shouting “Go with yourself” at anyone who'll listen. And that's just fine.

A more percussive album. That's the premise left to us by Emily Nussbaum's gripping profile of her in the New Yorker, centered on the turmoil and liberating joy Fiona went through while writing her fifth album. Eight years of near-total silence have passed since the release of The Idler Wheel…, beginning with a tour cut short so she could stay by the side of her dying pitbull, broken only by a handful of scattered live appearances — mostly as a guest with other artists — and by a few unreleased tracks scattered between a compilations and some high-profile collaborations. But eight years on, Fiona is here again, freer than ever.

There's a common thread running through the most visceral, electric manifestations of Fiona Apple's art, those moments when her rawest, most nervous essence takes over and erupts into scorching songs, sung with fire in her throat. And Fetch The Bolt Cutters, her fifth album, is that Fiona at the full height of her creative power. Recorded entirely within the walls of her own home, it's a deeply percussive record, just as promised, where anything can serve the cause — furniture, chairs, even the bones of her late dog — right down to the resonance offered by the walls themselves and the wood of the furnishings, which soaks the sound in rustic colors. What strikes you right away is a compositional vitality that is, once again, quite staggering. Refined, elegant melodies that, like pearls, never fully open up, asking you to look at them sideways; a succession of enchanting harmonic openings, marked by that unmistakable, personal jazz touch; a pounding of keys, strings and percussion that converges into a carefully studied, enveloping rhythmic chaos; and a performance from Fiona that is scorching and passionate, now anguished, now bordering on playful. These are the small, telling details of a record that is as experimental as it is fun, exuberant, urgent.

The opening “I Want You To Love Me” is already paradigmatic, with its crystalline piano phrasing, its refrain stretched to the breaking point, its voice starting out limpid and gradually catching fire, its all-consuming desire sung through its lyrics, its coda of shrill panting breaths. It's hard to imagine a better opener. In the next song, Apple recalls the hard school days when she walked around “gritting my teeth to an imaginary beat”, and the result is “Shameika”, another brilliant piece of piano-pop. But it's in “Under The Table”, over sharply struck chords with melancholy shadings, that she delivers one of her most powerful assertions of will: “Kick me under the table all you want/ I won't shut up, I won't shut up!”, a surge that ties as much to the traumas of her past as to a thoroughly present-day need to reassert an absolute freedom, both human and artistic. At the close, the double bass vibrates and sounds like the beating wings of a bumblebee.

There's still room for a taste for the strange (“Relay”, the title track “Fetch The Bolt Cutters” and their controlled bacchanal of improvised percussion), but the songwriting consistently stays at the level of the previous record's peaks. “Drumset” is one of the high points, with a dense harmony of voices that wraps and sways like a body moving through space, out of which emerges an acceptance of the facts that feels more like resignation (“Now I understand, you're a human/ And you got to lie, you're a man”). In “Newspaper”, the subject becomes a love triangle, in a song of mounting tension with a crescendo of rhythms, voices and countermelodies that conjure up a pagan version of a gospel mass. There's also room for a pure declaration of love, “Cosmonauts”, and for a soul ballad, “Ladies”, both still marked by Apple's trademark quirks. Then it's time again for sweeping art-pop explosions. Out of the tribal pulse of “Heavy Balloon” an empathetic warmth slowly emerges, with Fiona singing “I spread like strawberries! I climb like pears and beans!”. But it's on “For Her” that, for a moment, the spell is broken. “You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”: these are words of blood, shreds of flesh from a past that cannot and must not be erased. And, in the background, the percussive frenzy slowly dissolves into ecstasy.

Evolution is often talked about as a process of moving beyond: an artist is what they are today only to the extent that they're no longer who they were ten years ago. From this perspective, Fiona Apple is no longer the child prodigy who rose to fame with tormented-girl ballads, or the twenty-year-old who shouted “this world is bullshit!” in front of a stunned MTV Awards audience. But the truth is that Fiona Apple is still all of this, and every facet of that girl, from the most precocious to the most immature, is still alive in her today. Fetch The Bolt Cutters is a strong, fragile, passionate, sensitive, restless work — it's Fiona Apple exactly as we've always known her, and then some. It's the product of an artist who has forgotten nothing, in search of a catharsis without release; who has learned to live with the chaos of her feelings and is ready to confront every new wound head-on. And to morbidly savor its aftershocks.

That's why it's both wondrous and frightening. It's a deeply human, empathetic work, yet at the same time far from reassuring. These are the thrilling trade-offs of a leap into the void. As in that Christopher Nolan film, we might say we're witnessing the prestige, that moment when the unexpected happens and something, out of nothing, reappears.

Between disappearing acts, endless silences and sudden comebacks, Fiona Apple's career is a grand magic trick that has repeated itself for years, yet still leaves behind applause and genuine emotion. She carries on as she pleases, at the pace of one album per decade, and every single time it's a masterpiece.

Contributions by Rossella De Falco (“The Idler Wheel…”) and Tommaso Benelli (“Fetch The Bolt Cutters”)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google