It's the first time Apple veers away from the expected course on Fetch the Bolt Cutters and it's hardly the last, but it's telling that the shift occurs within a song, not in a transition between tracks. There are the five dogs officially credited on the album, whose barks map the rooms of the house via reverb.About a minute into "I Want You to Love Me," the opening cut on her fifth album Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Fiona Apple holds a note a few seconds longer than you'd expect, then a few seconds more. There’s the actress Cara Delevingne, who stopped by long enough to record cat noises for the title track. There’s Apple playing the trampoline, Apple playing the “metal butterfly,” Apple clapping her hands, tapping out rhythms on her table, and jangling metallic items seemingly sourced from her junk drawer. Many of the album’s unexpected percussive and ambient textures tell you something about the house and its guests and inhabitants, both sentient and inanimate. She recorded the album there, on GarageBand, in her un-soundproofed home studio. The house serves as a kind of character, or universe, that helps bring “Bolt Cutters” to life. According to The New Yorker, Apple seldom leaves her home, which she shares with her close friend Zelda Hallman, except to take her dog to the beach.
On “Bolt Cutters,” more than ever, she refracts a lifetime of rage through joyous play and childlike imagination.īut my favorite aspect of “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is how it brings Apple’s house in Venice Beach to life. Rather, these all function as independent axes that she manipulates to intersect at odd angles. What’s amazing about Apple is that the emotional weight of her lyrics does not always dictate the tone of the production, or her cadence, or her vocal mode, whether it be singing, talk-rapping, murmuring, or speaking almost in tongues, Yoko Ono-style. Fiona Apple performs in New York on July 26, 2006. Conversely, on “Heavy Balloon,” she channels the gritty timbre of Melissa Ethridge and chants, “I spread like strawberries/I climb like peas and beans,” as if pumping herself up for a gladiatorial death match. Apple’s lyrics drip with scorn, but her voice betrays no anger. The mood of “For Her,” at least at first, is that of two young gal pals singing and rhythmically stacking cups in unison at summer camp. Her song “Please Please Please,” written at the behest of her label, is a sarcastic rejoinder that criticizes the creative pressures the industry exerts on its artists. Her famously long 1999 album title (“When the Pawn…” is merely the shorthand for a title that approaches 100 words) was inspired by a scathing Spin reader letter criticizing her VMAs speech. Apple’s music is interior and interpersonal, but it also operates in a much broader context, in conversation with (and defiance of) entire institutions and dominant ways of thinking.
In the aftermath of her infamous VMAs speech, NY Rock’s Otto Luck called her “annoying” and described her “husky, lovelorn voice,” “big blue eyes,” and the “much-publicized account of her rape at age 12” as a “formula made in heaven.” “The record execs at Sony must be coming in their Calvin Kleins over this one,” he concluded. In his review of Apple’s 1999 album “Where the Pawn…,” Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield called her a “spiritual sister” to the juvenile emotional solipsism of Korn and Limp Bizkit. Apple lived the same way she wrote - with intent and without fear.Įarly in her career, Fiona Apple withstood intense scrutiny from male music critics, many of whom painted her as an ingenue and mistook her precociousness and candor for immaturity. In 1997, nine days shy of her 20th birthday, she whipped up a firestorm with her righteous, off-the-cuff Best New Artist acceptance speech at the VMAs, in which she declared that the entire entertainment industry revolved around the “bullshit” premise of celebrity worship.
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