Fiona Apple

Before “FreeFiona!” and the collective hysteria, before turning into the gaunt icon of a tormented existentialism, the joy and torment of the indie universe, Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart was simply a sullen girl. A sullen, moody girl who kept her huge blue eyes lowered on the piano keys, hiding her shyness and that veil of contrite post-adolescent rage. But it wasn't a pose. That barely concealed resentment, that bruised disillusionment with which she spat out her aching confessions had nothing to do with the aesthetics of the 90s riot grrrls, nor with the post-feminist rhetoric of Alanis Morissette and her peers, to whom she was immediately compared. At just 18, Fiona Apple had already accumulated an unbearable weight of pain and anguish. Most notoriously: the sexual assault she suffered at just 12 years old, which left her with a sense of deprivation and an unfillable void: “Is that why they call me a sullen girl?/ They don’t know how I used to sail the deep and tranquil sea/ But he washed me ashore/ And he took my pearl/ And left an empty shell of me”. A shell, an empty shell stripped of its pearl.

That piano, then, became the lifeboat, the anchor to cling to in order to stay afloat in that ocean of pain. The sullen girl entrusts it with her whole self, flooding it with songs in a desperate cathartic attempt. But what might seem like a confused post-adolescent outburst turns out instead to be an extremely lucid piece of musical work: a sonic flow that stays coherent from the first note to the last, inspired by the shining stars of jazz and soul, but also by the melancholy allure of sophisticated songwriters like Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell. Sony can't believe its ears, and puts it out in no time at all.

A criminal hit

That talent, naturally, didn't come out of nowhere. The daughter of an actor and a singer/dancer, Fiona had started playing piano at eight in Manhattan with a collection of standards titled “The Real Book” and dreamed of following in the footsteps of her idols Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Music, in short, was her destiny, as was poetry, nurtured under the wing of her muse Maya Angelou, with whom she shared the tragic experience of childhood sexual abuse. “She's like a mother to me, she helped me get through some difficult moments and showed me the light”, Fiona would later reveal, thanking her inspiration in the liner notes of the vinyl reissue of “Tidal” as well.

But there's always a stroke of luck that lights the fuse. In Fiona's case, it was a friend named Anna, who babysat for producer Kathryn Schenker (Sting, Smashing Pumpkins). One evening Anna passed her a demo tape with three songs by the then-seventeen-year-old Apple, and Schenker was so impressed that she suggested the major label sign her. It would be Andy Slater who produced “Tidal”, the debut album of that enfant prodige, and who would go on to become her manager.

The harsh law of marketing, however, demands at least one single to break into the charts. The eighteen-year-old doesn't flinch and, with a veteran's craft, dashes off – by her own account – in a mere 45 minutes a sensual, feverish blues, to which she gives the fitting title "Criminal". There's almost something cynical in the clear-eyed way the girl offers herself up to the public, proclaiming herself a "bad bad girl" and murmuring at the piano a blend of perversion, cruelty and betrayal over the relentless cadences of the beat, complete with a (naturally) killer chorus unleashed at just the right moment. She'll pick up a Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance and an Mtv Video Music Award for cinematography for the voyeuristic clip in her underwear, directed by Mark Romanek. In short, that line from a 2012 interview ("I can write a hit, I know how that shit works") could easily have been attributed to her sixteen years earlier.

High Tide

But it's the whole of "Tidal" that holds together in a unique (and unrepeatable) balance between raw post-adolescent exuberance and startling compositional maturity. As if to embody the tide of the title ("Life is tidal, love is tidal", she would proclaim on Mtv's "120 Minutes"), the young New York pianist creates a restless flow of words and notes that at times cradles you, at times perilously drags you toward the abyss. Often the melancholy unspools slowly, drifting between trip-hop rhythms and light marimba, harp or even vibraphone trills (Jon Brion), as in the tender "Slow Like Honey", almost chilling in its defenseless daydreaming: "When I'm high like heaven/ When I'm strong like music/ 'Cause I'm slow like honey/ And heavy with mood".

Some of the album's best moments play out on these supple, reflective tones, starting with the aforementioned – and bloody – post-trauma self-analysis of "Sullen Girl", which beautifully seals a new format for the female ballad, suspended between jazz, soul and blues, distinct too from the equally memorable one coined a few months earlier by Tori Amos on "Little Earthquakes", an inevitable point of comparison. Less vocally gifted and lacking the classical background of the red-haired North Carolina singer-songwriter, Fiona nonetheless has on her side the instinct of a born soulwoman, a voice that's sharp and distinctly her own, as well as an almost titanic strength of spirit that has earned her comparisons to the courage of Nina Simone. The perfect epitome of this is the spectacular "Shadowboxer", a condensate of furious despair packed into 5'24" of impetuous piano-driven jazz-pop, handled with the class of a seasoned chanteuse, in service of a tale of betrayed love ("Once my lover/ Now my friend/ What a cruel thing to pretend/ What a cunning way to condescend"). No one hearing it could ever imagine it was made by an 18-year-old girl.

A personal style, as noted, not only in terms of vocal delivery but also in the range of musical references. Alongside the classic touchstones – nestled among jazz, soul, pop and singer-songwriter fare (among the latter, one could also cite Elton John and Carole King) – there's a perfect awareness of the contemporary moment, translating into oblique trip-hop beats and hip-hop urgency, as in the opening shuffle of "Sleep To Dream", where Fiona stares wide-eyed at the man who hurt her, firing off words like bullets in a husky voice: "I tell you how I feel, but you don't care/ I say tell me the truth, but you don't dare/ You say love is a hell you cannot bear/ And I say gimme mine back and then go there for all I care… Don't even show me your face 'cause it's a crying shame". Lines that would strike a young Kanye West like lightning, who would later say he was inspired by Fiona Apple because he wanted to rap "like he was on top of a mountain".

Less immediate and catchy, the second half of the album still offers precious gems like the sinuous, Arabic-tinged "The First Taste", thirsty with sensuality, the melodramatic "Never Is A Promise" – almost set apart from the rest of the tracklist by its grandeur, complete with strings arranged by Van Dyke Parks paying homage to the big bands and music-hall symphonies Fiona grew up with in her family – the other two piano ballads "The Child Is Gone" and "Pale September" – the former more relaxed with its glimmer of hope ("the darkness turns into the dawn… I suddenly feel like a different person"), the latter more subtly unsettling with its obsessive chimes driving Fiona's romantic vocalizing – or the hazy "Carrion" that closes the record on a somewhat glossy jazz-soul cabaret backdrop, repeating the same melodic line with stubborn resignation, as if to mask the harshness of the hook lines ("My feel for you boy is decaying right in front of me like the carrion of a murdered prey").

Free Fiona

In the golden decade of female songwriting, dominated by the stars of Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, Sheryl Crow, Liz Phair, Aimee Mann, Sinéad O'Connor and their peers – ideally gathered together in the pink caravan of Lilith Fair – Fiona Apple set a new standard for the intimate singer-songwriter, at once vulnerable and strong-willed, able to exorcise discomfort, abuse, eating disorders and a deep-seated personal unease in a handful of solid piano-and-voice ballads where the orchestra tiptoes in and out.

"Tidal" would sell three million copies in the US alone, going platinum. But the media's fantasy of turning Fiona into just another enfant terrible, and the music business's attempt to cage her within its suffocating rituals, would soon clash with the unyielding character of the sullen girl, determined to fiercely defend her artistic independence. Even if it meant preferring the shadowy side of the stage to the shallow glare of the spotlight, even if it meant making enemies with lines like "This world is bullshit" (at the 1997 Mtv VMAs). So much so that it would take her fans mobilizing to get her third album released after it was shelved by Sony ("Extraordinary Machine"), through the "FreeFiona!" campaign.

And so the fate of the almost-diva would be fulfilled, sacrificing stardom on the altar of personal dignity, transforming herself into a cult indie muse for a smaller, but no less adoring, crowd of followers. Even critics would bow at the feet of bold, experimental records like "Fetch The Bolt Cutters" (2020). But, for this writer, the allure of that painful debut, of that sulky girl with wide turquoise eyes staring out at a world that had just betrayed her, will always remain unmatched.

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19/12/2021