Fiona Apple interview: "I can get myself free anytime"
Fiona Apple's revelatory Fetch the Bolt Cutters is our album of the year, arriving right when we needed it most.
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- Pitchfork (@pitchfork) December 8, 2020
Pitchfork conducted a series of interviews with Fiona from late June until October.
Some highlights are behind the cut.
- On her sensitivity: "I'm really, really sensitive, and it's not easy. I'm a person who does not have a thick skin. And I don't think I really want a thick skin. I don't want to grow a callus all over myself. I don't feel like I would be able to make anything that I would love if I did that."
- Struggles with not being a "proper" musician, but likes the honesty of not achieving perfection: "I like that I finally went: 'I'm me. I'm going to accept what I am and try to make something good out of that.' I'm proud of myself for getting to a place where I could say: 'don't wait until you're perfect'."
- The end of "For Her" was an endurance test: "I was sweating and shaking while I was doing those vocals, as though I were getting rid of toxins inside me."
- The voice contortions at the end of "I Want You to Love Me" were a reaction to a mistake. "I make very, very strange sounds without meaning to if I think about things that embarrass me, which is very often." She also realized she was inadvertently making an impression of her sister's dead dog.
- On calling all the shots with her music: "I feel like I'm in a good relationship with the world. I feel like I showed up for a date with no makeup on, like I banged my head and I lost my tooth and I showed up bloody and wearing half a T-shirt and one sock, and my date went, 'Hey, I like you, come on let's go. That's OK with me.' Which is a great feeling."
- On findinding stillness: "I remember being told: 'When there is agitation, look where there is no agitation.' So if you have agitation inside, then go and look at a tree. It's not agitated. It's doing what it needs to do. Go and watch the ants work when they're gathering crumbs. Just look at something that's working and let it ground you."
- On the power of meditation: "When you're in that [meditative] space of just observing yourself and observing things as nonjudgmentally as you can, you feel more capable of handling it all, more capable of sorting it all out."
- The title track and "Newspaper" were created after they all thought the album was done; Fiona still had more to say. She poured out the two tracks over percussive instrumentals she had created. "There are some chords I put into "Fetch the Bolt Cutters," but I didn't know what to do, so I decided to do C-A-G-E-D, 'caged'. I had the title of the album for like three years, but when I wrote the song, it kind of acted out the fetching of the bolt cutters for me, and the cutting of the bolts. So I think that, for that reason, it feels like it's me. It's where I was born."
- On her bolt cutter tattoo: "It was my own stamp of approval on myself. And it's a reminder: 'You got out of this situation. What's the next barrier you got to get through?' It also goes back to Extraordinary Machine. I am the bolt cutters, an extraordinary machine. I can get myself free anytime."
Source.