It’s true that in 30 years, Fiona Apple has released only 56 original songs, on five albums, but she packs in more interpersonal danger, impassioned candor and radical tenderness than artists with triple her catalog. Whatever’s lacking in quantity is exceeded in payload. “You fondle my trigger,” she sings on “Limp,” “then you blame my gun.”
So many musicians have trod the roads of love that we’re probably desensitized to the experience of the journey. Or: Not enough songwriters have the facility, dexterity, observational sagacity — no, no, the courage — to ensure that “in love” means something. Apple’s songs invite us back to the euphoria of attraction and the nausea of repulsion. The heart in her music seems like a place one resides. She’s on one side; he — whoever he is — occupies the other. Is there a wall? Does the wall have a door? Who’ll unlock it? Who’ll smash it down?
What she has been offering these 30 years are commanding confessions, admissions, pledges to grow and change. (“Here it comes: a better version of me” is how she put it.) Apple’s always emerging — from a depressive fog, from some volcanic fugue, from recalcitrance, from fear, from disappointment, from being too inside herself.
During the first spring of the pandemic, she once again emerged, this time from an eight-year absence, with “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” which is also the name of the album’s third song, an epiphany about shedding dead weight in middle age. This isn’t a scream from some hound of love (though dogs do bark on the recording). The song sounded new for her — tender, budding. She steadies herself to urge the titular command. And what emerges is a crated cat making its tentative yet resolved exit, and “whatever happens, whatever happens.”
Apple was a teenager when she made her debut in 1996. She spoke her mind in a way that tends to turn women’s new fame into notoriety. Three years later, she returned with songs that drew on a mighty musical intelligence and writerly imagination to make something visceral of her bruised pride and reputation. Apple works at this vertiginous juncture where Emily Dickinson goes rumbling into Etta James and, lately, Beyoncé; where Nico solves puzzles with Randy Newman, Kurt Weill, Nina Simone and the Beatles.
She subsequently pushed her music into new realms full of surprising incongruities: hip-hop clacks (“Fast as You Can,” “Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song)”), rain-dance heaves (“Every Single Night,” “Heavy Balloon”), a gnat-buzz guitar chord (“The Way Things Are”), ’70s suspense cinema (“Valentine”), a bird giving everything it’s got to flight (“Daredevil”), plus all those music box chimes. And the older she gets, the bigger, braver and more wounded her singing has become.
What makes Apple a tremendous songwriter is her tenacity. The songs are about guts. Spilling them, trusting them, checking them. These are songs of utter persistence, of utter utterness. For all else Apple loses (her temper, her stability, her way), she won’t let go of her pen or piano, of the outrageously free, devastatingly beautiful noise she can make of all that loss. — Wesley Morris
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