444. Fiona Apple, "Extraordinary Machine"

 


There are so few artists with a truly unique voice.  The kind of artist where, when you hear them, you know it can only be one person.  And I don't necessarily mean "singing voice," although that's sometimes the case (see Cocker, Joe, or Waits, Tom).  I mean an entire style of music, a sound, the whole thing.  Fiona Apple is one of those artists and God bless her for it.  I'll give you an example.  A while back, my wife and I started watching "The Affair" on Showtime (not a terrible show in the first couple of seasons, before it devolved into crazier and crazier shit as finally went madly off the rails) and the show has an arresting and immediately memorable theme song.  I knew the instant I heard it that it was Fiona Apple but had to check anyway because I always doubt myself and of course it was.

I really liked this album, from which I had never heard a single track, quite a bit.  It starts off with the title song, which is like the opening song in a musical that I would definitely like to see.  I loved "O'Sailor," with its rolling piano and langorous and regretful vocal and super catchy chorus.  There are just so many musical ideas on this album it's dizzying.  I used to write songs and I can tell you how hard it is to come up with even one good idea and they just seem to come pouring out of Fiona Apple.  

My read on the lyrics - and this is not a revolutionary or particularly insightful take - is that I hope I never break up with Fiona Apple because you do not want to be on the wrong end of a Fiona Apple breakup album.

Reading up on this album, I became apparently the last music fan in America to find out that she originally recorded the whole album with famed indie producer/songwriter Jon Brion, then had to scrap that whole thing and re-record it with new producers because the record company didn't like it and then the Jon Brion version leaked online and now, predictably enough, everyone likes the Jon Brion version better.  I deliberately didn't listen to any of the Brion version to, you know, keep the project pure but now I guess I should check it out to see if it's like a metal version with distorted guitars and booming drums or more of a thing like "the piano is higher in the mix."

Anyway, great album, I'm glad I found it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip hop"
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th
Read more