FIONA APPLE TIDAL SKIN

“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.”

FIONA APPLE TIDAL SKIN

“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. “I didn’t think of it as a fun thing to do,” she told The New York Times in January of 1997. Hers are rigorous pop songs because writing was survival. “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.” But more often than not, it is a death stare in the face of a world that doesn’t deserve Fiona’s smile. Its moodiness unspools slowly, from its wonky trip-hop beats and banged keys to its featherlight trills, marimba, and harp. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. She is sent to Arkansas to live with her grandma, never knowing if her St. “When I refused to be the child they knew and accepted me to be, I was called impudent and my muteness sullenness,” Angelou writes. After, she grows quiet she is no longer interested in games. 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.

“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.”

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 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. 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). No surprise, then, that spirals of poetry and jazz formed Fiona. The internal rhymes hang onto one another and lift you up. Is that why they call me a sullen girl? They don't know how I used to sail the deep and tranquil sea But he washed me ashore And he took my pearl And left an empty shell of meĮach word, like rocks tumbling into jewels, falls into the next.

Fiona apple tidal