New Fiona Apple Album Spring 2011

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I heard Every Single Night on the radio this morning. It was gorgeous.
 
I'm surprised beegee hasn't shared her thoughts on the new single. Has she spontaneously combusted from high levels of exposure to its awesomeness?
 
Link

FIONA APPLE was angry. Very angry. “Angry, angry, angry,” as she put it during a long, unguarded conversation on a Friday afternoon in SoHo. About a year and a half ago, after she had completed the album she’ll release on June 19 — a collection of stripped-down, percussive songs that’s as passionate, smart and cutting as anything she’s done — Ms. Apple got so angry that she started walking up and down a hill near her home in Venice, Calif.

The album was in music-business limbo. Ms. Apple was delaying it until her label, Epic Records, found a new president. She had not made a new album since 2005 and didn’t want her work to be mishandled amid corporate disarray. And she was in deep personal turmoil. “I just spiraled downward, and everything looked bad,” she said.

She started to climb that hill for eight hours a day, day after day, until she could barely walk, until she was limping, and then until she could not walk at all. Her knees required months of therapy. “Something about that was a rite of passage,” she said. “I think it’s really healthy to lose things or to give things up for a while, to deprive yourself of certain things. It’s always a good learning experience, because I felt like it really was like, ‘I must learn to walk again.’ I had to walk out all that stuff, and I knew it was stupid, and I kept on walking.”

....

“The Idler Wheel” is counting on the devotion of Ms. Apple’s fans. Before she appeared at South by Southwest her manager, Andy Slater, said he told Epic Records: “ ‘I want you to do nothing.’ I said: ‘Don’t make any posters. Don’t make any cards. Don’t put out a single. Just don’t say anything. Let her play the show. It’s been a few years. Let kids go to the show, film the thing, put it on their blogs, and you don’t need to do anything.’ ” Almost immediately after her set amateur video clips were on YouTube.

Ms. Apple’s new songs are proudly skeletal. “I wanted to make everything as stark as possible, so you could hear everything,” she said. While her previous albums have relied on studio bands and orchestral arrangements, “The Idler Wheel” is almost entirely a collaboration between Ms. Apple and the percussionist Charley Drayton. “I felt we could take the same risk with sound as the songs were taking,” Mr. Drayton said by e-mail.

The album’s minimal personnel reflects Ms. Apple’s isolation. By her account, she spends nearly all of her time alone. Her occasional hangout has been the Los Angeles club Largo, where many collaborators — including her past producer Jon Brion and members of Nickel Creek — perform regularly, and she has sometimes been coaxed to sit in. “The only place I go is Largo, and I’m not exaggerating,” she said. “I walk my dog at dawn because I don’t like people to be around.”

Ms. Apple and Mr. Drayton produced the new album together, making music largely from her piano and other keyboards, his drums and sounds they collected. At the apartment of one of Ms. Apple’s ex-boyfriends, the magician David Blaine, “we threw pebbles down his garbage chute,” she said. “We threw a big huge water bottle down the spiral staircase. We hit the big water tank he uses to drown in.” Elsewhere Ms. Apple recorded the machinery at a plastic bottle factory and the screams of children playing.
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Not sure I like the description of what this album's going to sound like. Bjork's Medulla? PJ Harvey's White Chalk?

These are like the low points of their respective artists.
 
White Chalk was a low point?

Anyway, intimacy suits Fiona better than bombast. I think she'll do something great with this sound.
 
White Chalk is incredible. If there's such a thing as a lesser PJ Harvey album, it would be Uh Huh Her.
 
LemonMelon said:
White Chalk was a low point?

Anyway, intimacy suits Fiona better than bombast. I think she'll do something great with this sound.
Click to expand...


What constitutes bombast? I think When The Pawn is far and away her best work but it's got a LOT of Jon Brion in its personality.

And yeah. White Chalk was boring as fuck. Not even close to the similarly downbeat Is This Desire? Uh Huh Her may not have been as consistent as her better albums, but its high points are great.
 
lazarus said:
Apparently tickets for her show in L.A. are $63?


Fuck off. Now I'm going to download your album for free, too.
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You think that's bad? For the Chicago Theater show, shitty seats on the balcony are $79 on Ticketmaster. That better be one hell of an hour long show.
 
On first listen it's a bit underwhelming, to be honest. Every Single Night, Regret, Werewolf, and Anything We Want were the main songs that stuck with me, and Hot Knife too, though I'm not sure if its the music or Fiona's vigorous commitment to the butter metaphor.
 
Anything We Want was the instant favorite for me from the first listen.

It doesn't even feel like a new song anymore.

The rest has been a bit overwhelming, but I remember feeling the same way when EM was first released.
 
I absolutely love the new album. It sounds like Fiona, only giving less of a fuck. The production is as spare and intimate as advertised, and the arrangements are as eccentric as I had hoped, yet Fiona's vocals and piano have not ceased to be beautiful. She also hasn't stopped writing about love, which is something she's still doing a great job of.

It's not an album for everyone, but I don't remember a single note I disliked on first listen. I can only imagine how great future listens will be.
 
I'm.....kicking around the idea, but not sure. Not really big on seeing concerts in general, although I just checked and there are still $40 tickets, so, maybe?
 
LemonMelon said:
It sounds like Fiona, only giving less of a fuck.
Click to expand...

Happened to catch an interview with her on NPR , and she basically admitted this point - that she's gotten to the point where she, "in the nicest way possible," just gives up - on caring what others think, on following a certain dream or whatever. She said she's basically become satisfied just doing what she's doing. The whole interview was really interesting, I thought.
 
:hi5: Good to know my ears are working.

Seriously, everyone should hear this, even if I know the reactions won't be as positive as my own. I knew I would like this album based on the descriptions and it being Fiona (she hasn't made a less than solid album yet), but it's rare that I like every song on an album from the very first listen, and most I love.
 
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