We Ranked Every Fiona Apple Album And Good God, Why Did We Do This To Ourselves?
How does 'Fetch The Bolt Cutters' stack up against Fiona Apple's incredible discography?
When Fetch The Bolt Cutters dropped at the beginning of this month, critics scrambled over themselves to call it the pinnacle of Fiona Apple’s career. But to be honest, it was far too early to make that call.
Of course, nobody is denying that Fetch The Bolt Cutters is a late-career masterwork. But Apple’s spent the last few decades dropping nothing but masterworks, and we needed to wait a few weeks and sit with Bolt Cutters to really understand how it slots into the back catalogue of an artist who has never released a dud.
The album is, after all, the definition of one that grows on you — it takes at least a few listens to navigate around the whip-smart tonal changes, and the melodies nestled within melodies like Russian dolls. The first time you listen to it, all you can do is sketch out its territory. It takes longer to situate yourself in it.
fiona apple in a full suit of armor on the subway photographed by joe mcnally in 1997 pic.twitter.com/po4gf9jp4x
— ⧉ ????? (@gusfenty) April 23, 2020
When it comes to ranking Apple’s records, one runs into the problem of the stiffness of the competition. Saying The Idler Wheel is better than Tidal feels like saying love is better than kindness — like trying to rank a thousand equally important things on an entirely arbitrary rating.
But hey, these lists are never objective. Instead, they’re opportunities to pick apart careers — and who has a career as exciting to pick apart as Fiona Apple, an artist who has only ever followed her own desires, crafting out one of the strangest, most distinct discographies in contemporary music?
#5. When the Pawn…
I know. Heresy. But what else would take this spot? And anyway, there’s nothing shameful about the fifth position on this list. Being the least successful Fiona Apple album is a little bit like being a saint instead of an angel — all considered, you’re still doing pretty bloody good.
Released in 1999, When The Pawn… is held in place by two of Apple’s poppiest, most accessible singles, ‘Fast as You Can’ and ‘Paper Bag’. But around those two iron posts, the record snakes and moves in surprising, complicated directions. ‘Love Ridden’, which starts strange and only gets weirder, is a hint of Apple’s future discursive style, while ‘Get Gone’ skitters between emotional binaries with an intelligence not seen in contemporary American pop since Carole King.
It’s compact, it’s handsome — it’s burnished oak. That there are four records better than it at all — let alone four Fiona Apple records — is kind of astonishing.
Best track: ‘Love Ridden’
#4. Tidal
Sometimes, the twin successes of ‘Shadowboxer’ and ‘Criminal’ overshadow Tidal. But even stripped of those two chart-topping singles, the record is still one of the strangest, strongest debuts in American pop music history. ‘Sleep To Dream’ borrows from the African rhythms and chants that would one day become Apple’s trademark style, while ‘The First Taste’ takes a bleak look at a doomed relationship.
And that’s the thing: Tidal boasts some of the most acute, cutting lyrics of the first half of Apple’s career. Before she traded her autobiographical koans for vaguer, foggier and just as astonishing epithets, she used to be one of our most abrupt and descriptive artists. “Darling, give me your absence tonight,” she sings on ‘The Child is Gone’. “Take the shade from the canvas and leave me the white.” American pop would never be the same.
Best track: ‘Carrion’
#3. Extraordinary Machine
By 2005, when Extraordinary Machine dropped, the critics had reached their sniffiest appraisal of Apple. In an article that sums up the mainstream critical attitudes of the time, Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker tried to shame Apple for speaking openly about her assault, and made unpleasant remarks about the singer’s weight. His assessment of Apple’s music wasn’t much more incisive, either. He called the album “girlish”, and claimed the title track was the musical equivalent of a curtsey.
Of course, that’s not what Extraordinary Machine sounds like. A humming, complicated thing, the album is a jaunty puzzle-box of different tones and textures. They’re all obviously and distinctively Fiona Apple songs, but none of them sound much like any other. ‘Get Him Back’ is a colossal wave of Coca-Cola and broken glass, and ‘Better Version of Me’ hides the singer’s voice underneath coils of percussion.
Some were shocked when Apple released The Idler Wheel, considering it a break from the performer’s usual style. But she had always been weirder and more surprising than critics had ever realised. It would just be a while until they would start hearing her for what she was.
Best track: ‘Not About Love’
#2. Fetch The Bolt Cutters
We waited a long time for Fetch The Bolt Cutters, and then, a mere month after we were first alerted to its existence, it was upon us. Its release date pulled forward due to the coronavirus pandemic, the album is perfectly suited for these strange, disrupted times. It’s lonely, it’s antic, and it’s circular, following these dusty, curved paths around itself, the auditory equivalent of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.
Apple had been working on it for months, but it feels like it was explicitly written about our life now — about the strange things that have happened since we’ve been locked inside and forced to content with ourselves.
It’s also Apple’s most explicitly autobiographical record since Tidal. The elliptical poetry of the singer-songwriter’s latter career is still present, but some lines are like snapshots: torn moments of plain self-description, as though Apple can’t stop sketching herself on the margins. In the days since it has been released, its power has only grown. Who knows what it’ll be doing to us in months or years time?
Best track: ‘Cosmonauts’
#1. The Idler Wheel
“I’m amorous but out of reach,” Fiona Apple sings on ‘Valentine’. “A still life drawing of a peach.” What other musician has ever described themselves so succinctly, or so beautifully? That’s been the Apple story from the very beginning, after all — both deeply giving, and ever-so-slightly removed; an artist who reads her confessional poetry through a megaphone, from half a mile away.
That, in fact, is the great genius of The Idler Wheel, an album that both reveals and obscures, sometimes at exactly the same time. It’s precise enough for the audience to understand that they are listening to someone sing their entire world, transforming a way of being into song. But it’s not naked — it’s deeply self-mythologising, turning its subject into a kind of titan, made up of scraps of poetry.
And then there’s ‘Hot Knife’. After all that beautiful strangeness, the album ends on a note of pure, uncomplicated lust; a description of two bodies, and the things that they can do to one another. No other musician has ever written anything quite like it.
Best track: ‘Valentine’
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @Joseph_O_Earp.