|
Post by Admin on Apr 17, 2020 6:42:07 GMT
Fiona Apple may have already given us the lyric of the year: “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long.” Fetch the Bolt Cutters is, in fact, the title of both the song where she murmurs the line as a refrain and her first album since 2012. Apple couldn’t have known when she quoted the line, first uttered by Gillian Anderson in the BBC crime drama The Fall, that she’d be releasing the record into a world on house arrest. But Apple has always been spookily prescient about the mood of the culture, magnifying her own internal landscape until it starts to look like a near-future map of the universe. As a young artist in the late ’90s she wrote piercing songs about, among other things, her experiences with sexual assault and mental illness—topics mainstream pop culture mostly avoided until well into the 21st century. Critics praised her music but mocked her preternatural candor; in retrospect, you get the sense that the presence of such a talented, articulate, tortured brain in the head of a beautiful teenage girl threw them for a loop. Two decades later, Apple has outlasted her haters and now lives a tabloid-proof life in Venice Beach. For company, she has her dog, a roommate and the roommate’s dog. When a reporter asked her, last year, whether she’d seen the movie Hustlers—which includes a scene where Jennifer Lopez strips to Apple’s 1996 hit “Criminal”—she replied, “If I were a person who actually left my house, I’d go.” It figures, doesn’t it, that Apple was voluntarily self-quarantining years before the rest of us were forced to? She even did much of the work on Bolt Cutters at home, where she cobbled together a studio and recorded with the help of GarageBand and a three-piece band of veteran musicians (bassist Sebastian Steinberg, drummer Amy Aileen Wood and singer-songwriter David Garza on guitar), with whom she shares production credits. According to a recent New Yorker profile, Apple laid the rhythmic foundation for the album by leading the ensemble around the house, where they chanted and banged on homemade percussion instruments. Comfortable though its author might be in semi-seclusion, the album arrives as a message in a bottle from one castaway to a sea full of them. You bet Fiona Apple knows what it’s like to be bouncing off the walls of your bedroom—and your skull—with too much time to second-guess every choice you’ve ever made. How lucky for listeners that her unsparing introspection possesses the alchemical power to make us feel less alone in ours. How 'Love & Basketball' Changed My Life Mountaintop sage is a role that suits her better than enfant terrible ever did. Now that the culture is catching up with her, Apple has evolved in the public imagination into a sort of folk hero—trolling powerful sexists, reaching out to other artists who struggle with mental health, donating two years’ worth of proceeds from “Criminal” to refugees. In a 2018 video, she responded to a fan’s question about whether she still believed the words she’d notoriously muttered during a photo shoot in the ’90s: “There’s no hope for women.” Apple patiently explained that she was a scared kid back then and that the music industry in particular had changed for the better in recent years. “We’re gonna be fine!” she exclaimed, shifting into encouraging-big-sister mode. “There’s always hope for women. We are hope.” Bolt Cutters takes a special interest in her relationships with women. Though she’s proven her feminist mettle over and over again, she has also taken more than her share of abuse from women—especially early in her career, when she was accused of giving girls eating disorders and allowing her 19-year-old self to be objectified in music videos. On “Ladies,” she repeats the title until its two syllables become meaningless, then slides into a lilting torch song for “good women, like you/Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through.” Still, Apple admits that she can be weird with, say, her exes’ new girlfriends. Amid a gentle metallic clatter, the title track opens with a plaintive, charmingly clumsy admission: “I’ve been thinking about when I was trying to be your friend—I thought it was, then, but it wasn’t—it wasn’t genuine.” Perhaps because having compassion for women also means having compassion for herself, she affords herself the same respect: “Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up,” goes the sing-along chorus to “Under the Table.” The record’s conversational tone, manifested in Apple’s talky delivery as well as in lyrics that scan as prose more often than poetry, creates a rare intimacy. And it’s echoed in compositions defined by their rough edges: hand claps; a cappella passages; sudden shifts in tempo; vocals that alternate ragged whispers, attenuated moans and bracing falsetto with her unmistakable throaty croon. Ambient sounds—the dogs barking, people talking—as well as seconds of near silence, made their way into the mix. As beautiful as the melodies and the epiphanies they carry often are, the songs are not what you would call “pretty.” This makes the album a significant departure for an artist whose early style was defined in large part by sophisticated, bespoke arrangements created with collaborators like acclaimed producer and composer Jon Brion. Yet Bolt Cutters wouldn’t be the extraordinary experiment in aural and lyrical honesty that it is if it sounded too polished. The record is a missive from the mini-studio in Apple’s house to whatever confined space we’re stuck in these days, compelled as we are to spend a lot more time than usual in our own heads. It offers us a roadmap to understand who we are and make peace with who we have been; to take responsibility for our worst selves and protect our best ones; to come out of our ordeal stronger, wiser, but still self-critical. From Fiona’s lips to God’s ears: We’re gonna be fine.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 18, 2020 8:40:08 GMT
It’s only April, but music critics are already declaring Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters the best album of 2020. The reclusive singer-songwriter — who has embarked on a willfully uncommercial and sporadic career since her breakthrough at age 18 with 1996’s Tidal — dropped her first album since 2012 on Friday, and the highly anticipated release has received unanimously rapturous reviews. “Fetch the Bolt Cutters Is Raw, Introspective and Everything We Need Out of a Fiona Apple Album,” says Time. “Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters Is the Album She Deserved to Make All Along,” says Vulture. “Fiona Apple's Fetch the Bolt Cutters Is a Blistering, Emotional Triumph,” raves USA Today. “Fiona Apple’s Stunningly Intimate New Album Makes a Bold Show of Unprettiness,” proclaims the Los Angeles Times. “Fiona Apple Makes Defiance Sound Exhilarating on Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” says the Boston Globe. And those are just the publications’ headlines. Many of Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ reviews acknowledge the eerie — but welcome — timing of an artist known for being intensely private and introspective releasing an album in the middle of a nationwide lockdown. Maura Johnston of the Boston Globe calls Fetch “an ideal album for this decisively odd moment,” and Spin’s John Paul Bullock calls the record, which was almost entirely recorded at Apple’s house, as “a quarantine LP that was made before we were all in quarantine” — a “product of cabin fever” that “occasionally feels claustrophobic,” but is “an undeniably fascinating and complex collection of songs.” “The reclusive artist’s fifth record, released with the world at a safe distance, couldn’t have come at a better time,” declares The Independent’s Alexandra Pollard in her five-star review. “Given the circumstances we find ourselves under, it is welcome to receive an album that rewards repeated listening,” agrees The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick. The L.A. Times’ Mikael Wood says: “The result of Apple’s self-imposed social distancing is the stunning intimacy of the material here — a rich text to scour in quarantine.” And Time’s Judy Berman muses: “Apple couldn’t have known when she quoted the line [“fetch the bolt cutters”], first uttered by Gillian Anderson in the BBC crime drama The Fall, that she’d be releasing the record into a world on house arrest. But Apple has always been spookily prescient about the mood of the culture, magnifying her own internal landscape until it starts to look like a near-future map of the universe. … You bet Fiona Apple knows what it’s like to be bouncing off the walls of your bedroom — and your skull — with too much time to second-guess every choice you’ve ever made. How lucky for listeners that her unsparing introspection possesses the alchemical power to make us feel less alone in ours.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 19, 2020 2:26:13 GMT
Grammy-winning singer/songwriter beloved legend Fiona Apple has released Fetch the Bolt Cutters, her first album in almost eight years. The title of Fiona Apple’s fifth album comes from The Fall, the Netflix crime drama starring Gillian Anderson as a police detective. Confronted by a padlocked door to a room where she fears a woman has tortured, the character commands: “Fetch the bolt cutters.” “Fetch the bolt cutters,” she sings. “I’ve been in here too long.”The songs, as usual, are extraordinary. She is working with a four-piece band that includes drummer Amy Aileen Wood, bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and guitarist David Garza. Apple has a full load of rough-and-tumble compositions that make their own rules as they clatter about and gain power when she digs in. Apple is strict, playful, vulnerable, and ultimately sure of herself as she interrogates past relationships, as well as her own heart and mind, and asserts her right to be heard. Listening to her fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, which drops today, the moments that shock most are its triumphant peaks. It roars with the mess of womanhood, and across its 13 brazen, occasionally brash tracks its dares that you do not look away. Fetch the Bolt Cutters rewards an open mind, and once you find their grooves, their talons latch on and sink in, gripping you at bone level. Giving into toe madness, embracing the yawps, yells, screams, and cursing, it turns out, is the reward. It may not be perfect, but it’s pure. Welcome to pure rock catharsis.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 20, 2020 20:57:42 GMT
Singer/songwriter Fiona Apple dropped the ultimate quarantine gift on us all this past Friday with the long-anticipated release of her fifth studio album, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” her first since 2012’s “The Idler Wheel.” The album touches on topics such as healing wounds of self-loathing, to toxic relationships and, finally, Hollywood predators. She’s been outspoken in recent interviews about her challenging experiences with men, including Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino in The New Yorker. The album’s penultimate song, “For Her,” uses ironic wordplay to tell a story of one of Apple’s friends, who was an intern at a production company. “Never showing weakness unless it’s a ward’s season / It’s the season of the ward / And she’s trying to cut the cord / She’s tired of planting her knees on the cold, hard floor of facts / Trying to act like the other girl acts.” Not hard to guess what “a ward’s season” is riffing off. “It’s partly inspired by conversations I had with this woman I knew years ago, when she had been an intern for a film-production company, and she gave me permission to write a song about this. It’s really a song for her,” Apple told Vulture in a recent interview. To, in a roundabout way, tell her story that she’s not able to tell. It’s relevant that she started as an intern because that’s why the lyrics are, ‘It’s a ward’s season, the season of the ward.’ She said he always talked about her like she was his ‘ward,’ like he was there to protect her from all of Hollywood’s creeps.” In the same Vulture interview, and in line with the album’s themes, Apple also spoke candidly regarding her thoughts on her ex, Louis C.K., the comedian whose reputation darkened when sexual misconduct allegations began to surface — and how his mea culpas since have maintained a certain shade of doubling-down defensiveness. When the accusations against Louis C.K. began to emerge, Apple sent him a letter asking that he “dig deeper” in reflecting on his treatment of women.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 23, 2020 18:30:16 GMT
Inspiration can strike at unexpected times. That was the case for Fiona Apple, the celebrated singer and songwriter who released her first album in eight years this month. It's called Fetch the Bolt Cutters and the title comes from a piece of dialogue that struck her while watching a crime drama on Netflix. In one episode of The Fall, a British show starring Gillian Anderson as a police detective, Anderson and her crew track down and free a girl who had been kidnapped and locked away. "It's just a throwaway little line," Apple remembers. "She just says, 'Fetch the bolt cutters.' I shot up from the couch and I wrote it on the blackboard immediately, and I said 'That's what my album's called.' " The line captures much of what Apple articulates on the record. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is an album full of demands to be let loose, to be let out of a cage. NPR's Ailsa Chang spoke to Fiona Apple about getting a push from King Princess to release her album early, the dinner party gone wrong that inspired "Under The Table" and how the reception of Tidal shaped the woman she is today. Listen to the radio version in the audio link above and read on for an extended transcript of the interview. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Ailsa Chang: I want to talk about the title of your album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Tell me what that means? Fiona Apple: It came from a TV show, The Fall, that me and Zelda, my housemate, were watching three years ago, I guess. And during this scene, Gillian Anderson is unlocking this door. They're supposed to wait for back-up to come and she wants to save this girl from behind this door, and it's like a throwaway little line that she says. She just says "Fetch the bolt cutters." I shot up from the couch, and I wrote it on the blackboard immediately and I said "That's what my album's called." So who is fetching the bolt cutters, in your situation? I am, you are, the listener is. Everybody is. It's sort of "Fetch your tool of liberation. Set yourself free."
|
|