Photo by Benjamin Lozovsky
There is a certain masochism to being a diehard Fiona Apple fan. It means learning to love at a different tempo than the fans of other musicians; it requires a three-to-seven-year commitment to a promise she never actually made. Waiting for new songs without ever knowing if you’re waiting on anything at all, for sure, is the primary act of FA fandom. Another Fiona record is never guaranteed us, as well-read fans know that Fiona claims she’ll never write again after finishing an album.
But such is most fandom: stupid. Stupid like when I was 20, on a Megabus to see Fiona in Washington, D.C. for her "hype tour" ahead of The Idler Wheel’s release and I googled her, and the first results were "Fiona Apple cancels D.C. concert due to illness." Of course, my next attempt met a similar end, this time owing to my illness, my undergrad-requisite bout of mono and its forced decision between spending what meager energy I had on driving to Atlanta for the show or finishing my midterms. I kept the ticket—intangible as it was, being an email and all—and left my seat in Atlanta unoccupied because, somehow, that felt honorable.
After my two disastrous attempts to see Fiona, I began to wade through YouTube searches of each concert as it happened—figuring that if I couldn’t see Fiona Apple, I could at least trail her music and movement from afar.
In commemoration of The Idler Wheel’s three year anniversary and in lieu of a new album, the following playlist provides a sort of salve for the Fiona fan’s long-suffering wait for new material—a palliative immersion in the bootleg recordings of Fiona Apple. The videos represent the very best recordings of Fiona’s live performances from an archive compiled in the years since the tours. I mention all of this because dashed hopes are a universal aspect of idolizing Fiona Apple; thus, fans have the need to continue to find novel interests in a years-old album. The playlist below provides one means of doing so, enlivening old tracks in exciting ways and offering viewers new vantage points from which to view their icon, new points of focus to tide us over for a while/ever.
1. "Sleep to Dream" at the Vegoose Festival (2006)
This is the siren struck with divine madness. Fiona displays her voice as instrument, but one that convulses when blown—and Lord, does she blow, just barely getting out the "I’ve got my own hell to raise" line before devolving into indecipherable squalling. Her screams continue, but at this point Fiona—twirling the microphone like a baton—puts the mic back on its stand, so that she can proceed to Fiona-dance to the instrumentation, but soon retreats behind the piano, where she appears to hide out.
You will come to love the way the camera always verges on catching her face in focus, Fiona always evading the lens with her frenetic movements about the stage. And the shot where Fiona, crouched behind the piano for the duration of the outro, scans the crowd with blunted affect. Leering, she ends the song squatting behind and beneath the instrument upon which she built a career both luminary and nefarious—you will come to love this too.
2) "Not About Love" at the Los Angeles Greek Theatre (2012)
"Not About Love" is one of the best love songs of all time, albeit one persuading itself against being a love song—a classic on par with "Criminal"—but here it's even more iconoclastically Fiona. "THIS IS NOT ABOUT LOVE/ 'CAUSE I AM NOT IN LO-OVE!" she skreaks. There is not better word for it: this is a scream that creaks from being so well-worn and tread upon. Refusal presses down on her voice, giving a reckless vibrato to her fumbleruled assertions that this is not about love.
Best part? The fans’ chorus of "Oh shit, oh shit!" when the drummer begins to play, the rhythm immediately alerting all the stans which song was next.
3) "Fast As You Can" at the Independence Jam (2012)
When she trails off from the misplaced pre-choral line "If you’re getting any bright ideas," it’s as if she has had one of her own when she comes back to the mic with an improvised line that’s just inaudible, leaving us to fill in the blank. The next line, also improvised, is audible amidst the fevered audience’s fevered howls: "Invest again," she adds to the classic chorus’ beginning, "Baby, scratch me out/ Fast as you can." The line at once persuades the lyric "you," the audience, and Fiona herself to invest in the lyric "I" and their relationship, to tune back into the performance and forget about album versions, and finally for the Fiona on stage to keep singing the lyrics as written.
Apple then marches back to the piano, weaving herself back into the song’s regularity as she pounds on the keys.
4) "Extraordinary Machine" at the Hollywood Palladium (2012)
This performance gives the rare sight of a Fiona musically attuned to the audience, rather than the band—a smile at the sing-alongers, though other nights have her diverting their expectation with a clenched, furrowed tremolo. But that night, she gave Hollywood a knowing and loving smile, of knowing, loving exasperation: the core of not only this performance, but Apple’s music in general.
5) "Parting Gift" on The Carson Show
After three-and-a-half minutes of bare-bones piano and voice, Fiona ends the song sitting bent over the keys. At the first clap of applause, Fiona jolts, a small jump of surprise. She explained to Pitchfork in 2012: "Once the song starts, it's as though you have gotten drunk and you can't help it. The room just starts spinning. But you wake up later and you're fine; when I come out of the song, I'm out of it."
6) "Tymps" at the Independence Jam (2012)
Fiona is first and foremost a percussionist. With each album, the piano has receded in the wake of a percussive wave that had its crescendo with The Idler Wheel, which she co-produced with drummer Charlie Drayton. According to Drayton, no electric instrument is present on The Idler Wheel, which is what makes the heavy-handed electric guitar additions in live performances from the Idler era so strange. Of course, most live renditions are firmly planted in acoustic ground, but the Idler tours also give us electric one-offs like the Independence Jam’s version of "Tymps". Here, an electric guitar replaces the percussive edge that had elsewhere helped pull Apple up from the Female Singer-Songwriter Pianist quicksand mold.
That’s what makes this performance such a trip—at least, it is once the vocals end and give way to a jarring electric guitar solo that literally leaves Apple on her knees. Kneeling as if in prayer, it is Fiona’s visceral, near-violent bodily reaction to the shredding that makes this recording so…. well, electrifying. "Tymps" reveals the awe-inspiring caught in awe, the artist swell and swaying with currents of electric guitar.
7) "Dull Tool" at Liberty Hall 2013
"Dull Tool" is the song (from the This Is 40 soundtrack) that caused some sort of spat with Fiona’s label, rumored to have consequently pulled the plug on any support they could give The Idler Wheel. (For fans like me, this rumor is the only explanation that The Idler Wheel didn’t win the Grammy for Album of The Year, let alone be nominated… No seriously, she should have won.) It makes sense, then, that "Dull Tool" appears on Fiona’s Anything We Want Tour set list, and indeed she does whatever she damn pleases in this performance. "Celebration’s impossible," sang just once in the original hook, now stretches out into a full verse: "Celebration’s just impossible/ I want to celebrate/ But celebration’s impossible/ Make it hard for me/ Impossible."
Beyond the few verses, Apple delivers the song like silly putty, each hook and chorus different (yet miraculously concordant). The entire performance almost doubles the time of the original, with the last several minutes essentially a jam session for Fiona to riff and roll off her own diction. Amid her extempore belting, one can make out what sounds like stage-frightened self-comfort: "Say it when you’re dancing/ Say it when you’re singing/ Sing when you’re singing." Finally, she follows her own directions to give the audience theirs: "You better kiss when you kiss/ You better fuck when you fuck/ …Say what you mean and talk louder/ —Or not at all." (See also her performance of "Anything We Want" from the same night/venue, which similarly dissolves into jam-sesh territory.)
For all the ad libbed warble and uncertainty, Apple shows an exactitude when she intones "Kiss me/ Fuck me/ Say what you mean/ Talk loud enough/ Louder," finally reaching the song’s end with a detached "… Okay."
8) "When I Get Low, I Get High" (Cover) with the Watkins Family Hour (2015)
What can I say about this folksy rendition of Ella Fitzgerald’s hit? Backed by the Watkins Family Hour, this performance is notably recent, and that it became a news item for Stereogum and Pitchfork, among others, testifies to how slow-moving the Fiona Apple news is—considering Fiona’s solo cover of "When I Get Low, I Get High" has been on Youtube since 2009, "Performed at a private party in NYC."
It’s hard to say which version gives better insight into the live Fiona Apple experience: the endearingly awkward, shy chanteuse sputtering into the mic about the song—or the carefree vocalist happily flanked by friends on stage, who scrambles the lyrics but continues with gibberish, an "Aw, fucker fucker" (still in step with the rhythm), and finally a yowl of frustration and her hands thrown into the air.
9) "It’s Only Make Believe" Cover with Blake Mills at The Sinclair (2014)
Backing Apple’s take on the Conway Twitty classic and sitting beside her is Blake Mills, who made up half of the Anything We Want Tour and has collaborated on the few "new" songs that—God willing—signal a new album. Right beside one another, Apple and Mills deliver a naked rendition of "It’s Only Make Believe", with minimal help from the band. In this final verse, we witness some of the most intense screaming from Apple anywhere, who sings "Still, no one will ever, ever, ever know" with soda-syrup sweetness, only to shout "Just how much I love you so, I love you so." And finally, a crackling-in-the-flames scream of "It’s only," rabidly repeated until the conclusive "…make believe" arrives with no possible doubt about its tragic value.
10) "I Want You to Love Me" at Portland’s Newmark Theatre (2013)
"I Want You to Love Me" is quite simply the apotheosis of Fiona Apple. Period, no qualifiers. Everything comes together here: Apple’s piano work rises above anything she's ever done, building a melody of classic, immediate familiarity; the shift toward gravelly, unrestrained vocals seen with The Idler Wheel continues, but whereas there her voice was fortified by drums, here she returns to the piano, and the effect is a startling, pristine edge of falsetto that her growls now waver into.
And then there are the lyrics, their total departure from the relationship and romance material popularly expected from Apple—the song’s rocketing away from such expectations as it leads from consideration of self-aware temporalities to choral desires to articulations of quantum spirituality and reincarnation and back again to choral longings that seep into the final verse. If "I Want You to Love Me" is finally a love song with its plea for "you to love" Apple, it is also a love song to the universe similarly split between resignation and hope.