

This, in turn, led to petitions, protests in front of Sony’s Manhattan offices, and a riotous campaign to mailboxes of apples marked with the names of angry fans to the heads at Epic thought to be holding new music up. A trickle of promising leaks whetted fans’ appetites, but radio silence from the label about a release date led to wide speculation that the third Fiona album had been shelved. The pair began work on a follow-up to 1999’s When the Pawn … in the early 2000s, matching Apple’s sharpening lyricism and classical pop melodicism with Brion’s playful orchestral underpinnings.
#Fiona apple tidal mac#
The three-year journey to the release of 2005’s Extraordinary Machine was an obstacle course for Apple and her friend and collaborator Jon Brion, also known for his work with Macy Gray, Aimee Mann, Kanye West, and Mac Miller, as well as the soundtracks to films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I Heart Huckabees, and Punch Drunk Love. I’m still learning to be as chill about strife as “Extraordinary Machine” plays at, to see the quest to be “cool” as the act of futility and wasted time “ Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is telling me it was all along. It took time to see, say, “Carrion” - “My feel for you, boy, is decaying right in front of me, like the carrion of a murdered prey” - as a piece of deliberate melodrama. Here was someone who understood the intensity of teenage feelings but who had gained the necessary distance to view them as sort of silly. Back in 1996, when I was using Tidal lyrics to stoke the fires of doomed crushes on classmates, Fiona’s music was a light at the end of the tunnel of high school. It’s a story of an artist whose music has grown somehow a little more pure each step of the way, whose catalog is a breadcrumb trail leading the intrepid listener to startling revelations about love and self-sufficiency. The list below is a list of Fiona albums ordered by degrees of greatness. I should start by saying that in nearly 25 years of listening to Fiona Apple, I’ve never heard a bad album and have scarcely encountered a bad song. Apple’s catalog is a breadcrumb trail leading the intrepid listener to startling revelations about love and self-sufficiency.
