Fiona Apple

Essential Albums

  • Extraordinary Machine
    Extraordinary Machine
    Extraordinary Machine

    After a six-year official silence and turmoil surrounding the making of this album — she ultimately re-recorded it with a second producer, hip-hop specialist Mike Elizondo, taking over from Jon Brion — it's a pleasure and a surprise to find that Extraordinary Machine is ultimately Fiona Apple's best work yet. The arty textures of her previous work with Brion are hardly gone; the real news here is the charm and wry humor that now often accompany the singer/songwriter's musings about life and love. ("It ended bad, but I love what we started" is only one of a row of striking observations in "Parting Gift.") There are also powerful currents roiling beneath all this; she ends up smashing a (figurative?) "Window" rather than "him, or her, or me." Whether she intended to or not, Apple has raised the bar for everyone else with this work.

  • When the Pawn...
    When the Pawn...
    When the Pawn...

    Fiona Apple's enveloping sophomore album focuses on piano-based pop suited to intimate jazz cabarets. String arrangements add a sense of turmoil to the vaudevillian waltz "On the Bound" and a glamorous touch to the torchy ballad "Love Ridden," while paper-thin percussion clatters like fading footsteps on "Get Gone." Apple uses her unmistakable voice—a dusky alto bursting with wisdom, drama, and pathos—to deliver a piercing emotional intelligence throughout these moody, layered songs.

  • Tidal
    Tidal
    Tidal

    A few days after accepting her Best New Artist award at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards by calling the entertainment industry “bullshit,” a then 19-year-old Fiona Apple sat for an interview with the shock-radio personality Howard Stern. What’s the problem, Stern asks her: You’re young, you’re pretty, your first album—1996’s Tidal—is selling like crazy, and yet, you’re still angry. Everyone knows entertainment is bullshit—why take it so seriously? Apple holds her ground: Maybe middle-aged guys like you know that, she says, but middle-aged guys aren’t taking cues from MTV on how to look and act—teenage girls are. And for them, it is serious. At the time, albums like Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill and No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom (and events like the all-female Lilith Fair tour) had brought a feminist edge to the mainstream. But Tidal is both angrier and subtler. A rap fan who’s said the only album she bought in 1997 was Wu-Tang Forever, Apple knows how to make herself ten feet tall (“Sleep to Dream”) while also expressing how small society has made her feel (“Sullen Girl”). She sounds older than she is (“Shadowboxer”), but points out that sexual abuse has a way of making you grow up fast (“The Child Is Gone”). If she takes pride in her powers of seduction, it’s only because it’s one of the few she’s allowed to exercise (“Criminal”). While Billie Holiday—a childhood influence—transformed her pain with laughter, Apple wields hers like a blade: Discreet, but it’ll cut you. She’d grown up with classical piano and jazz standards—worlds where technical proficiency can often outweigh raw feeling. But for all its finesse, the lingering mood of Tidal is bitter and resolute: She’s going to bare her heart no matter how much it hurts. Listening to her spar with Howard Stern in 1997, you want to root for her not just because she’s getting bullied by a guy more than twice her age, but because she’s brave enough to fight back. As to her speech at the MTV awards, she says she got into this line of work to say whatever it is she wanted to say, and that’s what she’s gonna do. So how was she any different from him?

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About Fiona Apple

A pop prodigy turned avant-pop visionary, Fiona Apple (born Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart in New York in 1977) has never been afraid to speak—or sing—her mind. From the release of her 1996 debut, Tidal, the pianist and vocalist was hailed as a songwriter who possessed an almost pathological honesty, and while her artistic output is relatively scant, each one of her releases has made a massive impact. Apple’s second album, 1999’s When The Pawn…, doubled down on Tidal’s intensity and jazz leanings; its 2005 followup, Extraordinary Machine, escaped label limbo to become a singer-songwriter touchstone. The Idler Wheel…, released in 2012, offered more stripped-down sonics as it combined brutal frankness with acid wit, while 2020’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters felt truly unbound, with Apple “playing” parts of her Los Angeles home as percussion as she crafted labyrinthine yet raw statements on 21st-century womanhood.

HOMETOWN
New York, NY, United States
BORN
September 13, 1977
GENRE
Rock

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