RetroSpectreview: Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than The Driver Of The Screw, And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

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“The lava of a volcano
Shot up hot from under the sea
One thing leads to another
And you made an island of me”

Fiona Apple is a human being.

Yes, this is an obvious, self-indulgent statement, but it bears stating because even after decades of progressively retreating from the public sphere she’s still the type of person that can feel larger than life, out of our grasp. Twenty-three years is a long time, long enough for many of us to forget how much of a “thing” she was when her debut album stormed the music industry. The “Fiona Apple” people knew back then, for all intents and purposes, was not Fiona Apple. That person was a collage of televised moments and interview quotes, a bar of copper capturing the current flowing through the culture. In this case, it was that rabid obsession with celebrity that defined the late 90’s into the 2000s, where TRL and TMZ and tabloid culture seemed inescapable, when it not only felt commonplace but completely necessary for artists to construct a public image out of nothing but poise and stretched truths. Apple blankly refused to do this. She was candid about when was raped at twelve, and she spoke about her mental illnesses way before they were lent the weight they’re given now, until one day she was given the cold shoulder from her benefactors and settled into her current status as a cult artist. Cases like hers have happened before, and they will continue to happen for as long as the industry remains a facade for the acquisition of wealth in undeserving pockets, but has Fiona suffered the worse for wear because of it? Only she would know, but I like to think that, aside from her chronic struggles, she’s exactly where she wants to be right now, making music for herself and finding her crowd distilled down to the people who deeply care about her. 

And that’s where it’s important to reiterate her humanity, especially as this decade comes to a close. Fiona Apple carries herself in ways that transcend the typical artist-audience relationship. It’s not that she’s constantly reaching out to her fans; on the contrary, it’s her tendency to withdraw from the public eye for years at a time, her refusal to cooperate with the social media machine, and the consistency of her demeanor and intentions between these long periods of silence that draw others to her art. In 2019 you must assume everything in the entertainment industry is polished and presupposed, even at the underground level, and with the current market saturation and the emphasis on moral righteousness there’s no room for problematic behavior, for people to publicly fuck up and risk their reputations. Living your truth, if you’re someone whose career is dependent on public opinion, only works if you have nothing to hide, and even then there’s the threat that the void will call one day and an offhand comment will put in the center of a fiery, short-lived controversy. It’s makes sense why we don’t see Fiona on our daily feeds; she learned very early on in her career how much you can get burned from a tossed-off thought.

Yet it’s tempting to want that voyeuristic window into her consciousness, as her musical output, scarce at it may be, is an endless windfall of plainly-spoken truths dressed in a singer-songwriter package. It’s not just any package though; if we’re including her in the pop canon, Apple’s albums are among some of the most forward-thinking, well-constructed pop works of the last thirty years, each one benefiting from being contained sonic atmospheres tied together by a voice that borrows more from timeless classic jazz stylings than any trend of the day. Through her work, we level with our insecurities by witnessing how she and her characters deal with theirs, all couched in music that bears a critical attention to detail without betraying her artistic individuality nor her idiosyncrasies.

Here’s why 2012’s The Idler Wheel…, the only album she’ll probably end up releasing this decade, is arguably her finest moment: every decision made, from the minimal production to the sparseness of instrumentation, directly reinforces the qualities that make Apple such a captivating songwriter. But even more so, it’s that exact sparseness that puts the intentions behind those decisions on full blast. More than anything else in her discography, The Idler Wheel… allows you upon close listening to see every piece of the puzzle, to examine how these parts come together and to revel in its cohesion. That transparent quality makes it perhaps the most human record she’s done yet. Apple has always sounded confident on her records, but it still takes bravery to depend on so few parts to carry the weight of her arrangements. The thoughtfulness she’s demonstrated before is even more evident when you consider how she and her collaborators chose, mosaic-like, the places in her songs that needed embellishment and which needed space. Quite near everything on the album is based in live performance of acoustic instruments, and there’s no discernible guidance of the studio hand (nothing against electronic instruments, but the lack of their presence only helps strengthen this peculiar feel). And in that environment, without much distraction, her voice is that much more of a hurricane, her words sharper than ever. 

It’s all these choices that make The Idler Wheel… feel like it’s coming straight from Apple’s brain straight to your speakers, the normal obfuscations between artist and audience reduced to a minimum. Her lyrics aren’t perfect architectural constructs, because that would kill the point. Instead, they often bear a metrical asymmetry and a poetic roughness, with the brunt of their power coming from an exacting choice of words. “I may need a chaperone,” she utters in the chorus of “Daredevil,” and immediately her words summon notions of awkward middle school dances which then clarify the self-feeding combination of self-loathing, emotional immaturity and latent inferiority that keeps the narrator in a cycle of co-dependency and romantic frustration. It’s a brilliant comparison that pays off later in the breakdown during her raw, tantrum-like calls to attention. Some phrases she feels fit to explain in no uncertain terms, like her “tulip in a cup” metaphor on “Valentine.” On others she allows space to color the song, like how her childlike, whimsical imagery contribute to “Anything We Want’s” hard-earned purity. Still others feel like entirely brand-new sentences to the language that make perfect sense in their proper context. When she sings, “I ran out of white dove’s feathers/To soak up the hot piss that comes from your mouth/Every time you address me” on “Regret”, it’s such a novel turn of phrase that it feels genuinely shocking.

Lyrical contemplativeness on this level is nothing new to Apple’s work, but it’s the context her words exist in that gives them an unparalleled potency. For one, her vocal performances are both rawer and more technical than anything we’ve heard yet. The vocal swoops and octave jumps of “Left Alone,” the aforementioned tantrum on “Daredevil,” the shocking explosion of ugliness breaking apart “Regret”; Apple maintains an electrifying dynamic variety that keeps the listener engaged even on first listen. It’s still clearly Apple here, presenting us with the kinds of chord progressions and winding vocal melodies she’s known for, but there’s an adventurousness that livens such familiar ground. You’d be forgiven for buying into the disarming cordiality of “Every Single Night’s” first few moments, until it morphs so suddenly from those twinkling chords and Regina Spektor-like affectations into something much darker and more explicitly anxious. “Hot Knife,” meanwhile, is as close to a cappella as she’s come yet, as she layers her voice over and over until it completely embodies the kind of single-minded infatuation that a simpler take couldn’t convey. Throughout, Apple’s at the top of her game, living every word she sings with a vividness that borders on uncomfortable, with only moments from 1999’s When the Pawn… coming anywhere close to this album’s rawest moments.

Her band is with her every step of the way, though unlike her previous albums which, for all of their own triumphs, felt borne of studio sessions, there’s not much to separate the listener from the recording process. Apple and her collaborators experiment both thoroughly and unpretentiously with various instrumentation and found sound whenever they can, lending a home-grown quality to Apple’s arrangements that lifts them into another realm. Whole paragraphs could be written just based on the synergies between each individual part. Here’s one now: “Left Alone” opens with an extended timpani solo that seethes and swirls across the kit, implying violence while also setting a base tone that Apple later manipulates with her vocals. The piano that comes in afterward has this percussive quality, as if the hammers hitting the strings are touched with metal; under the descending melody you can hear this weirdly atonal contrapuntal line that’s nonetheless steadily moving upward. It’s a disorienting touch that primes the listener for the internal friction underlying Apple’s lyrics. As she starts singing, the drummer follows, his brushed snare hits filling in places where Apple starts to conjure the pain in her narrative. The smooth rumble of cello, the only other instrument on the track, adds a ton of disparate, negative emotions to the pre-chorus just with the simple physicality of the instrument’s lowness: there’s the manifestation of a calloused heart, there’s the tragedy surrounding its creation, and there’s the frustration of bearing the bitter darkness that it sweeps across the body. All of this is balanced against Apple’s words, which are spoken without any leading language, trusting the instruments to convey the message. It’s a five-minute storm of visceral bottled rage that only occasionally slips out of the bottle, wherever the drums go wild pre-verse and add a thrilling, relatable unpredictability.

One could spend forever poring over the details, but Apple and her band keep this sort of masturbatory cross-examination from being necessary for appreciation. It’s a heady album, but Apple’s singing, and these seemingly effortless small touches, convey emotion first and foremost, which is key to the album’s success. It’s blessedly easy to feel the uneasiness behind compromising dignity in “Jonathon;” or the unencumbered lift of spirit surrounding “Anything We Want,” and that’s entirely thanks to savvy sonic decisions and pure performance quality. Again, that’s nothing new to Fiona’s work, but it’s a mark of her enduring talent as a songwriter that The Idler Wheel… doesn’t just fit snugly into her decades-spanning oeuvre but sounds fearless in ways she’ll hopefully pursue down the line. In light of her upcoming album, no matter how it may be received, it’s a gift for all of us to have someone with such talent making music that, intentionally or not, continues to reaffirm our collective humanity, as beautiful or as ugly as that may be.