0.2.1 - You look like Taylor Swift, in this light
Sound like anyone you are thinking of?
Obviously you know that the person I am talking about here is Fiona Apple rather than Taylor Swift, but in my listening to these albums over the last couple of days, I've spent much of that time asking myself why the trajectories of those two women diverged so violently. Didn't Fiona Apple deserve the success, the understanding, the reward for her unflinching stubbornness and drive for what she wanted over what the studios and record labels wanted of her? Was time her true nemesis, and if nineteen year old Fiona Apple released Tidal now to the world in 2025, would she join the ranks of Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan and Gracie Abrams, inheriting an army of fans looking for honest, emotional, sultry, slightly dangerous music to relate to? I think it's more than a little possible.
It's here I have to admit that I - or rather, the younger, stupider version of me - was part of the problem.
I discovered Tidal as part of what you could dismissively call Lilith Fair music when that entered my musical sphere of influence through Tori Amos. I'd heard Little Earthquakes originally at a friends house because his slightly older, vastly cooler sister was into her; as was the style at the time, every time we heard something we liked at a friends place, the following visit would include the presentation of a blank C90 cassette tape, and an instruction to provide a copy of that album you liked when they had the chance. More came; Under The Pink in '94, Alanis released Jagged Little Pill in '95, but I'd already started listening to Verruca Salt's American Thighs and The Breeders Last Splash by then also. Tidal, if you'll forgive the pun, rode in on a wave of opinionated, outspoken, unapologetically messy young women which had come before, and washed inevitably into my CD collection shortly after release.
It's hard for me to stress quite how much I love this album. I love the way it sounds on a fundamental level. At it's most languid, it's sleazy and confessional; when it's angry, it's defiant. The bass and drums on this album rattle around inside me, and I'd recognise just about any song off this album from a single second of playback. My devotion to this album was not hindered by Fiona Apple's appearance on MTV, lying around in her underwear in the Criminal and Sleep To Dream videos, though the idea of younger me objectifying a young woman working through an eating disorder and significant PTSD and depression from being the survivor of a terrible sexual assault doesn't make me feel great.
Historical guilt aside, I listened to Tidal a bunch, but as I did so, I wasn't blind to the ongoing media attention directed at young Ms Apple. She made the classic mistake of speaking her mind to the press, and at award shows. She railed against the corporatisation of music, saying "This world is bullshit. And you shouldn't model your life—wait a second—you shouldn't model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we're wearing and what we're saying and everything. Go with yourself." a controversial take to be spouting while accepting an MTV music award. And every time she voiced her opinion or said how she felt rather than operating in sanitised PR soundbites, I heard or read the same thing.
Ungrateful.
Fiona Apple hates being a Rock Star.
Fiona Apple is a year younger than I am, and when I read that stuff I looked at my personal prospects and career and financial situation and thought 'Why wouldn't you want this? What is wrong with you? I'd trade anything to have your problems', but of course, I was young and stupid and incapable of looking outside of my own situation. So, thanks to a media cycle that loves to have someone to make the story, each article I read made me fall a little more out of love with Fiona Apple. By the time she released her second album with a ninety word title, which was a poem as a response to how the media was mean to her, the "Fiona Apple has lost it" poison was firmly flowing through my veins. Despite listening to Tidal relentlessly, I never bought or listened to the album more commonly known as When The Pawn...
And that's where my journey with Fiona Apple stopped; until COVID-19 descended on the world.
If music already was and still is a foundational pillar of my own mental stability on a day-to-day basis, in COVID it was necessary to my ongoing ability to function as a human being. I should have done this back then - I would have had the time, obviously, and probably listened to an album all the way through 1000 times in that period, just maybe not all different ones. I know that last statement to be true, because in the space of that fateful 15 or so months, I discovered Folklore and Evermore by Taylor Swift, converting my casual enjoyment of Red and 1989 in previous years into a case of full on Swiftie fever; and around the same time, music people I trusted started talking about Fetch The Bolt Cutters as a potential album of the year. It had been nearly 30 years since adolescent Rich had abandoned Fiona Apple. Maybe we had both changed. I had to know.
It might be a close run thing between which of the two women dominated my music listening time more in 2020; Ultimately, I think Taylor won out; she had two albums in that fateful period, and while her records have their own introspection and reaction to the moment, nothing on either of them feels or sounds as close to the frustrating mental unwinding I was fighting off myself as Fetch The Bolt Cutters does, which meant I had to be judicious in its application - this was not feel-good, happy-time music. This was the end point of the 19 year old Fiona Apple telling MTV video music awards viewers to find themselves. She certainly had, and it was a musician unafraid to put into lyric or music her frustration at the world, the choices she made, the ones she regrets and the ones she'd do a thousand times over. Nothing here is compromised in the name of commercialism, which can make this a tough listen though songs like Shameika and Under The Table have the hooks to remind you she can still write a hit, but only on her terms now.
I can't speak highly enough of this album, for a few reasons, but I would urge anyone reading this to not embark upon it as your first foray into her music; there's not a lot of air at the top of the mountain, and sometimes you need the climb to help yourself adjust. Right now, its number one in Pitchfork's list of the greatest albums released in the 2020's and it's up against some stiff competition (both Evermore and Folklore appear on that list as well). But as well as giving me incredible new music to listen to, it hacked away the mental block I had constructed all those years ago, and with twenty years removed, I could finally go back to the remainder of her discography and listen to them without prejudice.
When The Pawn... might have a ridiculous title, but it's become my favourite of her five studio albums; In the red curtained, low light, elegant speakeasy that exists in my mind, this is the soundtrack to that place; The Fabulous Baker Boys by way of Girl, Interrupted. Paper Bag is somewhere in my 50 tracks of all time, though I'm sure if I had to write that out it would be tortuous and incomplete. This is where I would tell people new to her music to start, and I love it dearly, an album I denied myself for years because of an image of an artist I was sold and found easy to believe.
Extraordinary Machines I don't have strong feelings about; I don't dislike it, it just bends under the weight of the albums it is in comparison with; The Idler Wheel... I like more; it's almost a proto-Fetch The Bolt Cutters, a signpost of what was to come eight years later; the snowball before the avalanche. There's sounds on there I really like, but if I am honest, it and Extraordinary Machines are 4th and 5th in my priority list of Fiona Apple albums to listen to, so while I appreciated going back through all five for this, it might be a while before they make it back into rotation.
I know a lot of Taylor Swift fans tangentially, in online spaces (and a few in real life, though less than you might imagine). Many entertain fantasies, dreams of meeting her, having some fleeting interaction just to say they've been seen, recognised, acknowledged by the biggest musical act of our generation. And while I'd never turn that down, I think I'd like to meet Fiona Apple more. We have more in common I think, and she'd be interesting, and genuine, and a compelling conversationalist I suspect.
And I'd at least be able to apologise for what I jerk I was in 1997.
