Fiona Apple Cuts Bolts During Lockdown

The latest from feminism’s favorite poet-singer defies restraint 

There’s music that everybody loves. There’s music that anybody can dance to, that takes hold of your hips and your feet and promises a whole new world of freedom, nights out you’ll never forget. There’s music that elates, that grieves, that tells the story of a person or a culture through instrumentation and lyricism.

And then there’s Fiona Apple. 

For those born before 1990, Fiona Apple was and is a woman who hit the music scene amidst a movement of female rockers who were changing the emotional tone of music and womanhood. Many in younger generations don’t seem to know who Apple is—but with the release of her brand-new album, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” it seems likely that’s about to change.

The album dropped April 17 and resounds like a genre of its own. This rock record pushes boundaries, diving into a sound of torrential humanity—the breath, the scream and the whole-dripping-heart of an artist who hasn’t sold her soul to the masses. 

“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” received a perfect score of 10 from music magazine Pitchfork, which named it “the definition of uncompromising” and furthermore exalted that “no music has ever sounded quite like it.” The last perfect score they gave was Kanye West’s ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,’ ten years ago in 2010. 

Now, Fiona Apple is a living historical figure. She released her first album ‘Tidal’ in 1996 when she was just eighteen years old, and less than a year later was accepting the 1997 MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist with her famous “this world is bullsh*t” speech. 

This minute of candor at the podium solidified itself as perhaps the first moment a 19-year-old woman spoke truth to power in such a raw and unadulterated way for a mass audience. “Go with yourself,” she said, axing the expectations of a Hollywood-consumed world.

To learn more about her and her influence on our contemporary moment, I sat down with Dr. Danielle Morgan of the English department at Santa Clara, a bona fide Fiona Apple fan who’s pulled a chair up to Apple’s table since the beginning—a fan who even teaches about her in courses on literary theory. 

‘Tidal’ was born the summer before Morgan started her first year in high school, and she, like the other young girls and women around her, reveled in the oasis of Apple’s full-feeling vulnerability.

“As a fourteen year old girl watching this, this was the first time I was seeing somebody who was close to my age who also seemed really aware of the game, of what women are expected to be,” Morgan said. “They often get described as angry rock singers, these kind of riot girl singers. But for me, it was less about being angry, and more about being unapologetic for having feelings.” 

What was earth-shattering about Apple and other singers like Alanis Morisette, Morgan explained, was their radical authenticity, the way they rejected the male gaze and any external stimulus that would dare to domineer them into something they, at heart, were not.

“Her feelings of dejection, her feelings of feeling too much, and being sort of unwieldy with the way she talked about emotion,” Morgan said, are what Apple knocked out of the park. She was tired of the status-quo ballpark, in fact, and simply made herself a new one at the same time that she sucker-punched sexism and other injustices she felt needed treatment.

Apple’s willingness and indeed obligation to bare her truth resonated with young girls like Morgan, who had never seen this sort of woman before. When she was a first year in high school, Morgan recalled that there was a board that students were supposed to mark with a lyric or poem that meant something to them at the time—half the board was filled with lyrics from Fiona Apple’s ‘Tidal.’

This woman certainly made waves, and her tide extends decades beyond in our 2020 moment. 

Morgan cited the “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” creator as the reason Billie Eilish exists today—a sentiment shared by NPR, who called Fiona Apple the “godmother of 2019.” Apple is what Morgan calls an ancestor to singer-songwriters like Eilish, Lorde and King Princess, the descendants of a Fiona Apple who originated subversive, melancholy girlhood.

“Look how authentic Billie Eilish is, and how authentic she always is, because someone like Fiona Apple existed first and took a great deal of flack for not performing a certain kind of gendered ideal,” Morgan said. 

An ancestor of this sort of freedom should definitely be celebrated.

And here we are, smack in the initial tremor of a record that’s sure to continue making history. An entire run-through of the album feels like that rubbed-raw sensation you get after a good, fifty-one-minute sob. You feel a little fractured after listening—because you might, in fact, have some cracks in you—but may also feel like somebody else climbed a mountain with your body. 

The feeling of expansion, when lungs find space to grow into that wasn’t there before.

Apple recorded the album at her Los Angeles home and a Pecan ranch in Texas, and used the spaces and sounds around her to further the sound. Five dogs, her Mercy, Maddie and Little—Cara Delevigne’s Leo and Alfie—are featured amidst Apple’s gritty voice and maddeningly compelling poetry. 

A passionate advocate for using the opportunities we are given, she also included a land acknowledgment for the indigenous nations—the Tongva, Mescalero Apache, and Suma peoples—on whose unceded territory the record was produced.. 

“People aren’t thinking about this every day, and they really should be—that we are not living on land that was ceded to us,” Apple said in an interview with Democracy Now! on April 28.

On the early release of her album, Apple explained that it was indeed purposeful. “I just wanted to release a record in a time I thought it would have a chance to be listened to, and I’m just so, so happy that it turned out—it seems like it’s actually doing the thing that any artist would want their art to do which is to help people feel free, especially when they’re not feeling free,” she said.

This feeling is on full display in “Relay.” During the expanse of the track, there come moments where it sounds like she’s just yelling into her room, where the feedback is a stunning, raw echo. An eeriness envelopes its landscape, and the ending strips the sound down to Apple’s most hauntingly whole, a cappella self. It sounds like she’s singing to tiles in a bathroom, like a song that’s a direct flight from the soul.

Apple writes otherworldly lyrics. The chorus, “Evil is a relay sport / When the one who's burned / Turns to pass the torch,” was penned by the now-42 singer when she was 15 years old, a few years after she was sexually assaulted as a child. She captures evil in a pithy rhyme that sounds downright biblical. The message: be the salve and stop passing the scorch. 

“Heavy Balloon” offers surprisingly gut-wrenching images that ache for liberation and sunward movement: “I spread like strawberries / I climb like peas and beans / I've been sucking it in so long / That I'm busting at the seams.” 

An empowered, outspoken woman refuses to shut up in “Under The Table”— “I would beg to disagree, but begging disagrees with me,” Apple sings, another rhyme whose destiny seems proverbial.

The title track, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” is the end-all proclamation to bullies, tyrants and insecurities everywhere: “I listened because I hadn't found my own voice yet / So all I could hear was the noise that / People make when they don't know sh*t / But I didn't know that yet.” 

She knows now—and she keeps showing the world how to stop holding back. It’s all absolute genius. A marvel of our time. Elder millennials are marveling over the master stroke that is “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” while a new generation has been offered the opportunity to get to know a living legend who seems like one of the only people to really sing it like it is. 

“We grew up with Fiona Apple, and this album feels like the culmination of all that growth,” Morgan said. “What Fiona Apple is talking about now is very relatable content to someone who has gone through the sort of traumas of teendom and early adulthood and is now kind of mid-life, and is still replaying and rethinking all of these questions, where the stakes are very different.”

Fiona Apple and her work embody what poet Kahlil Gibran wrote on suffering in his masterwork, ‘The Prophet’: “Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.” 

Apple knows pain and lets it see the light of day in her latest work, a heart standing with deep integrity in the warmth of the sun.