The second track on Fiona Apple’s debut album, released in 1996 when she was 18 years old, is a ballad about trauma. She describes the paralysis of depression: how the hurt stalks below the surface; how emotions rage and contort out of view. “And there’s too much going on/But it’s calm under the waves/In the blue of my oblivion,” she sings, as if facing a brewing wind, her voice a beacon of dignity, soul, and resolve. And then she digs deeper.
Is that why they call me a sullen girl?They don't know how I used to sail the deep and tranquil seaBut he washed me ashoreAnd he took my pearlAnd left an empty shell of me
Each word, like rocks tumbling into jewels, falls into the next. The internal rhymes hang onto one another and lift you up. No surprise, then, that spirals of poetry and jazz formed Fiona. She began on piano as an 8-year-old in Manhattan with a collection of standards called The Real Book (Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday were favorites). She was sent to psychiatrists, which she resented; once, staring at ink-blots, she made out the shape of a beetle and so proclaimed that she saw John Lennon’s face. Fiona has referred to Lennon as “God” and Maya Angelou as her “mother.” She slept with a compilation of Angelou’s writings under her pillow. “She had brought me through some tough times and shown me a light,” Fiona once said of Angelou, who she thanks in the liner notes of Tidal’s vinyl reissue “for everything you’ve ever written.”
In Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, first published in 1969, she describes her experience, at 8 years old, of being raped in her mother’s St. Louis home. After, she grows quiet; she is no longer interested in games. “When I refused to be the child they knew and accepted me to be, I was called impudent and my muteness sullenness,” Angelou writes. She is sent to Arkansas to live with her grandma, never knowing if her St. Louis family “just got fed up with my grim presence… There is nothing more appalling than a constantly morose child.” Angelou only warms up to the idea of talking again when a woman tells her that “it takes the human voice to infuse [words] with the shades of deeper meaning.” You can see why Fiona—having also been raped outside her home at age 12, retreating inward and taking solace in the act of writing—would find strength in this. Her music, too, is all words, all messages to decode, a potent mix of literary ambition and raw truth; scaling the depths of her vocal register, she swings and punches and finesses phrases with smoke.
It’s called Tidal, after all, to honor monumental extremes—the highs and lows of a force so awesome it forms waves that can wipe you away. When Fiona was 17, her three-song self-made demo tape famously found its way from her friend Anna, who was babysitting for a music publicist, to Andy Slater—who became Fiona’s manager and swiftly produced Tidal. Slater devised a sound based on Fiona’s interests in hip-hop, classical composers, and “old-school singers,” and with that Tidal contains some of the plushest and most atmospheric music in Fiona’s catalog. Its moodiness unspools slowly, from its wonky trip-hop beats and banged keys to its featherlight trills, marimba, and harp. But more often than not, it is a death stare in the face of a world that doesn’t deserve Fiona’s smile. “Life is tidal, love is tidal,” Fiona said on MTV’s “120 Minutes.” “It’s like the only adjective you could use to describe anything.”
Hers are rigorous pop songs because writing was survival. “I didn’t think of it as a fun thing to do,” she told The New York Times in January of 1997. “I thought it was the only thing I could do.” The songs collectively unpack the pain that hardens young women to the world—revealing Fiona’s thick skin and what she endured to build it; fight songs, and why she fights. It is often merciless. “Carrion” has an unusual tinge of optimism for a song that hangs on a hook of “My feel for you boy is decaying right in front of me like the carrion of a murdered prey.”
“Sleep to Dream” and “Shadowboxer” are the bones of the persona Fiona would come to project: skeptical, sensitive, and very smart; a lone young person betrayed by the ways of the world, summoning a colossal rage to match them. On these songs, she is a woman of herculean strength with her fists out, gloves on, building muscle to chip back at whoever has played her. “Once my lover/Now my friend/What a cruel thing to pretend,” Fiona sings on the latter. “What a cunning way to condescend.” One of the great wonders of pop music: that something so common could inspire a song so spectacular. She once said “Shadowboxer” is about “angry desperation”—“when your mind is fighting with your heart, when you know something isn’t good for you but you want it anyway, you’re trying really hard to do the right thing for yourself, but then finally you’re like, ‘I’m gonna do what I wanna do, I gotta do what my heart wants me to do, otherwise I won’t learn anything.’”
If “Shadowboxer” is her training ground, then “Sleep to Dream” is pure flexing. She rips the truth out of this idiot, she drags this guy who wronged her, all the while sounding self-possessed, feet on the ground, eyes wide, head clear, voice loud. It rumbles open, each word a drum: “I tell you how I feel, but you don’t care/I say tell me the truth, but you don’t dare/You say love is a hell you cannot bear/And I say ‘gimme mine back and then go there for all I care.’” Kanye said he was inspired by Fiona (and “Sleep to Dream” especially) because he wanted to rap like he was “at the top of a mountain.” On “Sleep to Dream,” Fiona sounds eight-feet tall. It’s full of classic Fiona missives, complete sentences of self-respect: “Don’t even show me your face ‘cause it’s a crying shame,” “I have never been so insulted in all my life,” “I got my own hell to raise.”
“Slow Like Honey” actualizes Tidal’s more glacial notes, its reveries that hang thick in the air with the accompaniment of Jon Brion’s vibraphone: “When I’m high like heaven/When I’m strong like music/’Cause I’m slow like honey/And heavy with mood.” In its florid verses, “Pale September” is her most classically romantic Tidal track, as she sings of “autumn days swung soft around me like cotton on my skin.” You might not include these on a mixtape of Fiona’s defining songs, but they turn Tidal into its own suspended universe nonetheless. You get why Solange, with her defiance and intellect and grace, deemed herself the president of the Fiona fan club—and why Perfume Genius once proclaimed that he should like to cover his body in tattoos of Fiona’s lyrics.
Tidal has some piano ballads of deceiving serenity, gentle but weighted by experience, heavy as cement. “Never Is a Promise” is the only Tidal track taken from her demo. In this severe six-minute confessional, you understand that of course Fiona comes from a lineage of stage actors and big band singers; its drama is operatic, with weeping strings arranged by Van Dyke Parks. It sounds so apart from the rest of the album—a song about absolute edge-of-the-earth isolation, about not expecting the world to catch you. “You’ll never feel the heat of this soul,” Fiona sings at its blazing peak, “My fever burns me deeper than I’ve ever shown/To you.” Throughout, she is calling out a person who says they will “never” give up on her. But she sees that “never” is hollow. How telling that this bracingly sad song is, at its core, a linguistic accusation. The last verse goes:
You’ll say you understandYou’ll never understandI’ll say I’ll never wake up knowing how or whyI don’t know what to believe inYou don’t know who I amYou’ll say I need appeasing whenI start to cryBut never is a promiseAnd I’ll never need a lie.
Bluntly, which is probably the only way one should talk about Fiona Apple, “Never Is a Promise” reminds me of a dulled, sunken feeling I could rarely shake in high school. It was then a soundtrack to falling on the ground, picking myself up, and seeing the world through blurry eyes. (“Of course I have an eating disorder,” Fiona told Rolling Stone in 1998. “Every girl in fucking America has an eating disorder.”) “Never Is a Promise” was an unlikely life-saver, something to float with and hide in. I had never heard a song this honest, and yet it felt like it was coming from inside of me: A song about the foundations we set for our lives, a snapshot of beginning to see this (bullshit) world a bit more clearly. Listening to it now, I am astonished not by the fact that a teenager wrote it but that the world might make her harbor all of this pain instead of releasing it.
There is an unmistakable, almost comic dissonance between Tidal’s biggest song—the thrillingly misandrist radio hit “Criminal”—and the rest of Fiona’s early catalog. She wrote it in just 45 minutes when her label asked for a clearer single. (“I can write a hit,” she said in 2012. “I know how that shit works.”) On “Criminal” she is the immortal “bad, bad girl” being “careless with a delicate man,” delivering it all with a not-unsubtle wink: “What would an angel say? The devil wants to know.” But “Criminal” is a power play. She is reclaiming hers for all to see.
People would constantly prod Fiona on how an 18-year-old could write songs as mature as these—as if the most horrifying shit does not happen to people when they are teenagers, as if Fiona does not make metaphors of a spider, the clouds, and a lily pad in reference to men. Why did they not ask instead how she became a genius? She sounds preternaturally wise on “The Child Is Gone,” with its cool sway, its knowing ease, evoking the cutting assuredness of Nina Simone. As “the darkness turns into the dawn,” she sounds self-aware, forthright, welcoming a grand revelation. “I suddenly feel like a different person,” Fiona sings, “From the roots of my soul come a gentle coercion.”
Tidal went platinum within one year and yet, Fiona’s best work was still to come. The pleasure and poetry and purpose of Tidal, though, only calcifies with time. So much of it seems to say: You could never feel the pain I feel because only I have felt it. There are things about me that you can’t see at all, because I have buried them so well. You don’t know who I am. But of course, in Tidal, we saw ourselves.
