And I know none of this will matter in the long run / But I know a sound, is still a sound around no one
Who does Fiona Apple make music for?
The joke answers are inconclusive- “The over-30 crowd,” “lesbians,” “teenagers with attachment disorders”. She’s an artist who has existed and grown alongside the internet but doesn’t have an associated social media era. There are attributes you can point to - her reclusiveness, her otherworldly talent, her frankness about trauma and mental illness, her willingness to bluntly lay bare the reality of a lived experience without a hint of exhibitionism. Such descriptors, however, fail to highlight how it feels to actually listen to Fiona Apple. Her music feels necessary in a way little art does, not just for its political message (all her records are explicitly feminist works) or technical mastery but for its overwhelming insistence on itself and what it speaks to as extant and valuable. Loving Fiona Apple isn’t merely projecting onto a celebrity, nor is it glorifying or indulging the struggles she shares with us. It is about being seen, even in disreputable sickness.
Everybody has their own history with her. Here’s mine: I bought Idler Wheel when I was 12 after reading a review in Entertainment Weekly, and I spent the entire summer with my fingers on the CD player, rewinding the bridge to “Daredevil” and memorizing the libretto. On dog walks, I would make the sound at the intro to “Periphery” in the gravel behind my house. I put both versions of Extraordinary Machine on my iPod classic (baby’s first torrent!) but the folders got mixed up, and the different versions would play back to back. I watched the “Criminal” music video over and over again, puzzle over why the camera stopped moving like that. I used to lay awake imagining a same man, a man I could love, a man in the same bed in the same city but not in the same room, a wall with a slot for a mattress. I wanted a place to put my helplessness, my suffocation, my fear, my guilt, all the papers I tore up. Fiona Apple gave hers to me.
So to finally get another album, after living eight years and about as many lives, is a gift. To get it right now is doubly so. I’ve listened to the album through about ten times in the past 24 hours (I was never good at moderation). I already feel myself clinging to it.
The opening track, “I Want You To Love Me,” opens with a cascading piano that translates yearning towards something metaphysical, something that craters your entire identity, before descending into Apple’s mimicked dolphin cries. It is the kind of miracle art most artists don’t get even once in their lifetime. There are at least three other songs on FTBC that are just as good.
Apple’s lyrical prowess has improved, with rhymes that topple over one another like the overlaid vocal tracks. The melody to “Newspaper” is a faint glimmer behind her shivering voice, with what might be her best written song ever, a serenade to lovers who do not know she is singing to them. Behind its desecration of personas and spin is the whisper of a ghost, this longing to be restored to the physical world by other people, to be granted grace through an impossible feat.
Fiona Apple’s jazz singer tendencies, which flittered only occasionally through the haze of Idler Wheel, arrive stronger than ever on songs like “Ladies” or “Rack of His”. The compositional agility that blossomed in her previous record has calmed, less exploratory and more rigorously crafted. “Cosmonauts,” originally written for the Judd Apatow film This is 40, carries a thoughtful and stunning history, a lapsed love song. These songs sound like the years they have lived.
The album’s title comes from an episode of BBC’s The Fall, in a scene where Gillian Anderson finds a woman locked up after being tortured. This kind of free-associative semiotic game speaks to a kind of deadened desire to see oneself in any media that is more resonant than any high-minded allusion. On top of that, the title song ends with a riff on the lyrics to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” and the sounds of actual hounds of love barking. The album belongs to a long lineage of “trapped madwoman” art.
So many of the tracks sound like schoolyard chants, the kind of nod that’s more evocative than any verbal imagery. “Shameika” becomes a nightmare of the divergent paths that were possible in childhood - we all had ‘potential.’ “For Her” recalls the girl groups of the 60s before building to its good morning, a guttural cry that breaks the song, and the album. In a single moment the entire album’s trajectory comes into focus; “For Her” is a song about rape, yes, but it is also a song about begging to be heard, to be seen as a person, beyond some abstracted pronoun. FTBC is an album about the lonely trauma of being thrust by external forces, immaterial and interpersonal, into being stuck both inside and outside a sense of self.
The last two tracks, "Drumset” and “On I Go” swirl further into a kind of isolated delirium, repetitive cries for a peace that does not come. “Heavy Balloon,” the best track on an album with no bad ones, is a stir-crazy fable of too much time for introspection. The visions of beans and deserts explode in a cacophony of uncontrollable similes and muted shrieks forbidden full release.
It’s fitting that such a claustrophobic record be released during a national quarantine. Fiona Apple has been in her room for a while now, since well before the pandemic. So have I. In retrospect, it’s comforting to know I wasn’t doing it alone. So much time has been eaten up speaking the thoughts that float through FTBC aloud to no one in particular; To receive them back from someone who does not know me, who has been listening, is a kind of ecstasy, or relief. The strawberries spread through my floorboards too, and I’m grateful to roll around beside a record that’s louder than the voice in my head. I’ve been in here too long.
with love,
helmet girl