FEATURE:
After the Ellipses…
Looking Ahead to the Tenth Anniversary of Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel…
__________
ALTHOUGH its full title is…
PHOTO CREDIT: Marilyn Minter for Vulture
The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, I abridged it for the sake of the title! You can get the album on vinyl, though it is pricey. I hope that it is reissued and more affordable ahead of its tenth anniversary on 18th June. It would be eight years since she followed this album with the extraordinary Fetch the Bolt Cutters. I think that her fourth studio album is among her best. An artist who has not dropped a step or released any albums anything less than spectacular, The Idler Wheel… is one that everyone needs to hear. I will come to a couple of reviews later on. Produced with Charley Drayton, it is a magnificent album! I want to bring in some interviews from 2012. Apple was asked about her much-anticipated new album. Following from 2005’s Extraordinary Machine, there was a lot of interest around The Idler Wheel… The New York Times spoke with Fiona Apple in June 2012:
“The Idler Wheel” is counting on the devotion of Ms. Apple’s fans. Before she appeared at South by Southwest her manager, Andy Slater, said he told Epic Records: “ ‘I want you to do nothing.’ I said: ‘Don’t make any posters. Don’t make any cards. Don’t put out a single. Just don’t say anything. Let her play the show. It’s been a few years. Let kids go to the show, film the thing, put it on their blogs, and you don’t need to do anything.’ ” Almost immediately after her set amateur video clips were on YouTube.
Ms. Apple’s new songs are proudly skeletal. “I wanted to make everything as stark as possible, so you could hear everything,” she said. While her previous albums have relied on studio bands and orchestral arrangements, “The Idler Wheel” is almost entirely a collaboration between Ms. Apple and the percussionist Charley Drayton. “I felt we could take the same risk with sound as the songs were taking,” Mr. Drayton said by e-mail.
PHOTO CREDIT: Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
The album’s minimal personnel reflects Ms. Apple’s isolation. By her account, she spends nearly all of her time alone. Her occasional hangout has been the Los Angeles club Largo, where many collaborators — including her past producer Jon Brion and members of Nickel Creek — perform regularly, and she has sometimes been coaxed to sit in. “The only place I go is Largo, and I’m not exaggerating,” she said. “I walk my dog at dawn because I don’t like people to be around.”
Ms. Apple and Mr. Drayton produced the new album together, making music largely from her piano and other keyboards, his drums and sounds they collected. At the apartment of one of Ms. Apple’s ex-boyfriends, the magician David Blaine, “we threw pebbles down his garbage chute,” she said. “We threw a big huge water bottle down the spiral staircase. We hit the big water tank he uses to drown in.” Elsewhere Ms. Apple recorded the machinery at a plastic bottle factory and the screams of children playing.
Yet the whimsicality of the recording belies songs in which Ms. Apple wars with her lovers and, often, herself. “Every Single Night” starts the album with the plink of a celeste and a lilting vocal, but Ms. Apple soon declares, “Every single night’s a fight with my brain” and makes a proclamation: “I just want to feel everything.” In “Daredevil,” after percussive thigh slapping introduces a track full of brisk cross-rhythms, she sings, “I don’t feel anything until I smash it up,” adding, “Don’t let me ruin me.” She wrote that song, she said, when “I was crying out to somebody who didn’t quite get the message.”
On these songs, she said: “I really let everything just get spit out. I would not second guess anything.” At times her lyrics anticipated her life. “There were songs I would write about breaking up with somebody before I broke up with them, months and months before I broke up with them,” she said. “And I’d go back to that song, and now it makes sense why I wrote that.” A restlessly dissonant new song, “Jonathan,” was named for the author Jonathan Ames, from whom she only recently parted ways; she calls him “a great, great guy.” When she wrote the piano part, she said, she told him the music — switching between “doomy” and “happy” — was like his personality, and he immediately asked, “Is my name in it?”
In Ms. Apple’s new songs she is no longer a self-righteous victim. “A lot of my earlier songs are blaming other people and never thinking that I ever did anything wrong, because I was always trying to be completely loyal and honest and pure,” she said. “It’s so nice to come to a place where you can see how you absolutely enabled all these things to happen. It makes you stop being angry at people. It makes you start being more empathetic”.
There is another great interview that is worth bringing in. Vulture featured the remarkable and genius Fiona Apple in promotion of The Idler Wheel… She is one of the most compelling and interesting artists we will ever see:
“There is a very strong argument to be made that Fiona Apple, 34, is the greatest popular musician of her generation. This, on its face, might seem like something of a misnomer, since Apple moves paltry numbers of “units” and is the antithesis of prolific. She also happens to be a longtime critic of the record industry, specifically her employer, Sony Records. (Strictly for comparison purposes, in the six-year span between Apple’s second and third albums, Britney Spears released five CDs, including both her debut and “greatest hits.”) Apple wrote the majority of her first album, Tidal, during adolescence; released in 1996, when she was 18, it was nominated for three Grammys. Her next two — When the Pawn … and Extraordinary Machine, released in 1999 and 2005, respectively—were similarly nominated and appeared atop virtually every top critic’s list of the best albums of the year (Kanye West has said Extraordinary Machine made him want to be the “hip-hop Fiona Apple”). But it is her latest—a stripped-down rhythmical and confessional tour de force—which, in its restraint alone, stands as her strongest work yet.
Her unique musical DNA—fusing jazz and the old standards with a dose of post-sixties singer-songwriter — seems inextricable from her biological one, a line of workman American performers steeped in vaudeville, big band, theater, and cable television. So that, in “Every Single Night,” the lines “Little wings of white-flamed / Butterflies in my brain” come with a slight fluttering; there is a quickening, a crescendo through “Swarm the belly, swelling to a blaze”; until, by the time “That’s when the pain comes in,” her contralto rings, erupting to accent when in an E-flat that, taken out of context, could be Callas’s, not to mention the almost diabolical use of robato to construct a chorus out of “brain,” stretched into ten notes, ten slurring syllables, in what it occurs to me very early one morning later in her living room in California, the two of us altered to the precipice of poisoning, green stars orbiting above us, her extraordinary voice ricocheting across space: musical onomatopoeia.
First, though, she had to come downstairs and meet me.
“How are you?”
We were at the hotel bar, and Apple said she’d been anticipating that question, simple as it was. It had played some part in precipitating her mood. She told me about her morning so far. She’d chosen the table in the farthest corner of the room, beside a window overlooking Grand Street. For a long time, following her lead, we made almost no eye contact. She was simultaneously shy and outgoing. “I really didn’t know how I am,” she explained. “I couldn’t figure out what the fuck was going on with my brain.”
Ten minutes ago, though, “in the nick of time, upstairs, I found the answer. All of a sudden, I thought, Mirror neurons! And I was like—”
Here she gasped. She said she’d felt like “Sherlock Holmes, finding the clue.”
She pulled out the piece of hotel stationery “that’s gonna make me look crazy.” She hesitated and said she couldn’t understand why she was so nervous. I interrupted to say I was nervous too. For the first time, she looked at me. Her eyes were huge and green, like mint chocolate chip when it melts. “That’s very” — she laughed — “mirror neuronal of you.” I asked what mirror neurons were. She said they’re what “make you feel empathy.” Here, she began reading rapidly, furiously, from the small piece of paper:
Mirror neurons Audrey Hepburn eyes drawing Funny Face empathy blind for a day Andrei’s mom yesterday quote friend naturally then again bad therapy rehash rehash retell details no! distract with laughter —
She explained: She does not typically watch TV at home. As soon as she gets to a hotel, though, she puts it on, usually TCM, with the sound off. This morning, when she woke up, the movie A Nun’s Story was on, which was funny, because yesterday, at the photo shoot for this story, she’d been thinking about Audrey Hepburn, because the photographer kept saying something to her like Big eyes! Big eyes! Huge eyes! and that made her remember that when she was a kid, she’d had this fear that she had unusually tiny eyes, and one day when she was home from school (she’d always pretend she was sick), she’d seen the movie Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn — she was afraid it was beginning to seem like she was obsessed with Audrey Hepburn, which she’s not — and she started drawing Audrey Hepburn’s portrait, over and over again, with insanely, distortedly huge eyes. Anyway, Funny Face was this silly romantic comedy, but she’d remembered this moment in it, she was like 10 years old, and Audrey Hepburn’s character starts talking about empathicism, or something”.
I am going to conclude with some reviews. Entertainment Weekly had their say about one of the best albums of 2012. The Idler Wheel… still sounds completely Fiona Apple and unlike anything else around:
“You can’t half-listen to a Fiona Apple album. You really have to work at it, analyzing the elliptical lyrics, carefully following piano runs that zig when you think they’ll zag. Her fourth full-length, which is called (deep breath!) The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, is no exception. It took Apple seven years to make, and even understanding the title requires you to spend some time with Wikipedia. (An idler wheel is the part of an engine that’s connected to all the other parts but doesn’t propel anything — a metaphor, Apple has said, for people like her, who look as if they’re doing nothing when they’re actually feeling everything at once.) Delving into classical music, jazz, art-rock, and show tunes, this is an album that will make you stay up late, playing each song over and over, trying to answer the questions it stirs up. Like, what does Apple mean when she sings that? she’s ”a neon zebra, shaking rain off her stripes”? What’s making that strange crunching noise at the end of ”Periphery”? What is a ”truck stomper,” and why is it listed as an instrument in the credits?
All of this might make The Idler Wheel sound like more trouble than it’s worth. That’s definitely not the case. Like Apple herself, it’s highly confessional and creative and temperamental, and will probably make you fall crazy in love. She and her co-producer Charley Drayton have mostly stripped down the arrangements to piano and percussion — the clever ”beats” include field recordings of machines at a plastic-bottle factory and pebbles thrown down a garbage chute — so there’s room to hear her parakeet heart beating wildly, feeling every emotion. Swinging between minor-key gloom and Broadway bombast, she hollers over children’s giddy screams on ”Werewolf,” threatens her ex on the menacing ”Valentine,” and delivers a furious Native American warrior cry on ”Every Single Night,” which finds her admitting, ”Every single night’s/A fight with my brain.”
There’s so much struggle here that when the one happy song arrives, near the end, she’s earned it. From the moment the pots-and-pans intro begins on ”Anything We Want,” Apple manages to re-create the rush of a first crush, singing about loving something the way she did when she was 8. Listening to her, you’ll know exactly what she means. You have to give yourself over to The Idler Wheel in a way you probably haven’t done since you were a kid, before jobs and other adult responsibilities claimed the long hours you spent curled up by your stereo speakers. It isn’t easy listening. But it’s worth it. A”.
Let’s round off with one more review. There was nothing less than elation and support for Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel… Pitchfork scored the album highly when they sat down to listen to it. After ten years, I am still discovering new layers to the brilliant The Idler Wheel… Everyone needs to check it out:
“This is the most distilled Fiona Apple album yet. While her celebrated previous work was marked by eclectic musical flourishes courtesy of producers including Jon Brion and Mike Elizondo, The Idler Wheel is fearlessly austere in comparison. She worked with touring drummer Charley Drayton on the album, and his touches are light and incisive. Speaking of the record's signature clattering percussion-- including thigh slaps, truck stomps, and "pillow," according to the credits-- Apple associated the homemade sounds with an increased freedom: "I just like that feeling of: 'I'm in charge, I can do whatever I want.'" And this musique concrète approach is not random. Every single waveform is pierced with purpose, from the muted heartbeat thumping through "Valentine" to the childlike plinks popping around the uncharacteristically optimistic "Anything We Want" to the chugging factory sounds that give "Jonathan" its uneasy rhythm. On the oddly life-affirming "Werewolf", a banjo shows up, plucks exactly four notes, and then dips out, never to return. "You made an island of me," she belts on that song, and The Idler Wheel's spareness does lend it an insular loneliness, one that's divorced from the outside world while also being intimately in-tune with its basic realities. As Fiona's self-drawn album cover suggests, the inner workings of her mind can be scary, ugly, and head-splinteringly vivid.
"Werewolf" also features the album's most jarring and powerful found-sound moment: just as the self-conscious ballad climaxes, the roar of children screaming on a playground enters, adding an uncanny mix of dread and wistfulness. The fact that Apple was inspired to insert the yells by a classic-movie battle scene that was running when she first played the song only adds to the sample's ambiguity as well as its spontaneity. Much of the album involves Apple's constant struggle between naivety and cynicism; on opener "Every Single Night", she sings, "I just wanna feel everything" and "every single night's a fight with my brain." The saga can turn into lacerating theater, as on "Regret", which, with its mechanical beat and ominous, monk-like ambience, could nearly pass for a track on Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral. The song also features the most brutal hook of Apple's career: "I ran out of white doves' feathers to soak up the hot piss that comes from your mouth every time you address me," she bellows, tearing her throat apart in the name of pure vengeance. And while she's undoubtedly one of our foremost talents at the art of the kiss-off, the blame for Apple's woes is a bit more spread out now. "How can I ask anyone to love me," she offers, "when all I do is beg to be left alone."
"Left Alone" is nothing short of a vocal masterclass. It has the singer going from the verses' rap-like cadence to the hook's curlicue jazz stylings to the operatic long notes of the bridge-- notes that slowly curdle underneath their own exasperated weariness. This makes sense considering Apple is a child of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and hip-hop, a songwriter who's spiking the Great American Songbook with today's mirror-upon-mirror confessionalism. She's able to convey more with a quick, original turn of phrase-- "my woes are granular," for one-- or an in-the-moment scrunch of the face than many pop stars are able to muster with 100-foot screens and volcano pyrotechnics.
It's an old-school approach, though it rises well above mere sepia Instagrams. Instead of being far-off and dreamy, her throwback moves are the opposite-- intrusive, corporeal. This is not background music. It demands attention. "Look at! Look at! Look at! Look at me!" she pleads on "Daredevil", a knowing admission of her self-destructive tendencies. But even after being thrown into the media spotlight at a young age, and having to deal with crippling doubt, Fiona Apple didn't go boom. She's still here, brave enough to indulge in raw emotion and smart enough to make those feelings carry”.
A staggering album from the always-amazing 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 is a masterpiece. It turns ten on 18th June. I wanted to spotlight and highlight it ahead of time. Go and check out an album that should get a lot of new love…
AHEAD of its tenth anniversary next month.