The Biggest Takeaways From Pitchfork’s Heartwarming New Fiona Apple Profile
Including a wild story about Fiona Apple's history with Ferris wheels.
It has been an extraordinary year to be a Fiona Apple fan.
First, the singer-songwriter released one of the best records of her career, the trembling and taped-together Fetch The Bolt Cutters. Around the same time, she also gave an honest interview with Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker in which, amongst other things, she talked about her relationship with music and with her exes.
And the profiles haven’t stopped coming, either. Just this week, Pitchfork published a lengthy chat with the artist in which she dropped a treasure trove of tidbits.
For a start, Apple revealed that she isn’t the Luddite she is sometimes painted as. In actuality, she loves Tumblr, and frequently uses the site to discover new obsessions and artworks.
Secondly, Apple also spoke at length about the contours of her own voice. She admitted that though once upon a time she liked to sing “pretty”, these days she’s just as happy to leave in the mistakes.
“I make very, very strange sounds without meaning to if I think about things that embarrass me, which is very often,” Apple says. “They’re not pretty sounds. So I think [the sounds on Fetch] are a musical extension of, ‘I fucked up.'”
Later in the chat, she also revealed an anecdote that is mentioned in passing in the song ‘Relay’, in which she talks about going on a Ferris Wheel in order to calm herself down. “Around the time of recording Extraordinary Machine, I used to get up every morning and walk to the Santa Monica Pier, which is like two and a half miles away, to be first in line on the Ferris wheel,” she told Pitchfork.
“And I’d go on by myself. When I got up to the top I’d try and take all the anger that I had about shit and just get rid of it. And I’d try to somehow take something good instead and put it in me, and then go back down the Ferris wheel. And then go home. I used to do that every day until they stopped letting you ride on the Ferris wheel by yourself.”
Perhaps the most heartwarming detail of the chat, however, is Apple’s description of how she ended up on the new Bob Dylan record, Rough and Rowdy Ways. “I’m sitting here with [best friend] Zelda in February, really relaxed, and we’re about to have dinner, and I look down at my phone and see [longtime collaborator] Blake Mills texting me.
“I hadn’t heard from Blake in months. And he’s like, ‘So I’m working on something, I can’t tell anybody about it, but we want you to come in and do something.’
“And I was like, ‘Um, I can’t I’m busy.’ And he was like, ‘Can I call you?’ So he called me and he goes, ‘OK, it’s Bob Dylan. Bob is asking if you will come here and record.’ And I went: ‘When?’ And he went: ‘Now.’ And I said ‘FUCK’ so loud that I could hear people on the other end of the phone laughing.”
Legends admiring legends — truly you love to see it.
Photo Credit: Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images