Fiona Apple on How She Broke Free and Made the Album of the Year

There is a radical openness to Fiona Apple’s fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters—in its fevered and physical compositions, in the forthright candor of its stories, in its rhythms so tapped into the pulsations of the world around her. And that rare attunement extends to her everyday life.

On a Saturday afternoon in late October, she was at a horse farm in Alabama, playing her ashiko drum in synchronicity with the birds in the sky. She texted over a video of her impromptu performance with commentary: “I drum with the birds in the trees/I know that time is elastic!” she wrote, a play on the lyrics to Fetch the Bolt Cutters opener “I Want You to Love Me.” But Fiona was also illuminating the evermore expansive way she has come to think about her own music 24 years into a singular career: in relation to her natural environment, to animals, open to chance.

Once, during 1999’s “Paper Bag,” she sang slyly of wishing on the illusion of a bird above, of hungering for love that she didn’t believe she deserved. But here was Fiona in 2020, communing with her avian audience in the context of a song where she unequivocally states her desire (“I want somebody to want and I want what I want and I want you”—five wants) for the love she knows she’s earned. All over Fetch the Bolt Cutters, the 43-year-old excavates past traumas—from the callousness of grown men to the cruelty of lunchroom bullies—with the uncontainable sound of growth in process.

She has spent the fall at the Alabama farm, home to the sister of her roommate and best friend, Zelda Hallman. Most mornings, Fiona and her beloved boxer pitbull Mercy wake up before dawn and take long walks to the nearby trees and stream. Fiona’s reputation has always been one of a voluntary self-isolator, but she likes to start each day touching water as a way of acknowledging her connection to everyone and everything.

Aside from the occasional tour or trip, Fiona said the farm was the furthest she’d ventured from her Venice Beach, California home in 20 years. She and Zelda made the journey in a minivan and brought along some of Fiona’s home-recording gear (her computer, microphone, drum). She had been working on a cover, and had also been experimenting there with ad hoc percussion: a washed out paint can she found on a walk, and some pine needles, which she tied into brushes using a piece of a dog toy. “They make a much bigger sound depending on what you hit them with,” she explained regarding her collaboration with the trees.

We had begun a series of interviews about Fetch the Bolt Cutters in late June, with subsequent FaceTime conversations and text correspondence through the rest of the year. Fiona also sent a stream of photos from her phone, including a scan of her brain, hummingbirds she “watched grow up,” and a series of petroglyphs she spotted while hiking in Topanga Canyon that sparked the land acknowledgment, on Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ back cover, that it was “Made on unceded Tongva, Mescalero Apache, and Suma territories.” She said the photos offered more than she had communicated in interviews: “This is the time I spend alone.”

I quickly learned of another way she spends her time alone: online. Contrary to public perception, Fiona is not technology-averse. She just happens to spend most of her screen time on an out-of-step platform—Tumblr—that has experienced a mass exodus in recent years. She said she loves Tumblr for its secret-world-building possibilities. One day in September, she was scrolling her feed of art and animal photos and posts from mental health communities when she came across the explosive music of 79-year-old avant-garde jazz hero and herbalist Milford Graves, who’s spent decades using cardiovascular equipment to record and study human heartbeats. “I feel like I’ve been searching for this man my whole life,” she said.

It’s Fiona’s intimate alignment with her own heart that makes her writing so transcendent still. This preternatural sensitivity is always awake inside her. “I’m really, really sensitive, and it’s not easy,” she said. “I’m a person who does not have a thick skin. And I don’t think I really want a thick skin. I don’t want to grow a callus all over myself. I don’t feel like I would be able to make anything that I would love if I did that.”

In between our FaceTime interviews, Fiona continued to share stories. Echoing Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ inquiries into childhood memory, she described scenes from youth, like the play she wrote, at age 11, based on Patsy Cline’s teardrop country tune “Seven Lonely Days,” and the tale of her first kiss, in ninth grade, with a poetic boy named Eddie, who later helped inspire her early hits “Shadowboxer” and “Criminal.” She sent a photo of four notebooks filled with journal entries from the late 1990s, which she thought she had lost (“I’m so glad I’m 43 and not 22!” she said after glancing in one). She texted a video of the actress Melba Moore singing “I Got Love” in the 1981 TV adaptation of the musical Purlie, which her father acted in, and she said watching Moore in rehearsals was one of her earliest memories.

The past and present formed a boundless collage, as they do on Fetch the Bolt Cutters—and she sent photos and videos from the album’s sessions, too. Scraps of paper contained song notes (“Keeping mistakes?”) and the beginnings of lyrics. Footage showed her working out drum parts at home under the glow of stringed lights; a photo found her learning to record on her laptop. There was an appealingly unmediated quality to it all. One video showed how, when the band Fiona assembled for the album—drummer and co-producer Amy Aileen Wood, guitarist David Garza, and bassist Sebastian Steinberg—were first convening, in 2016, to improvise at her home, they would instrumentally “score” the motions of their crew of dogs. In one pencil-sketched chart, the names of songs visually swirled together; a section of notes on “I Want You to Love Me” contained a series of eight arrows pointing up and off the corner of the page, as if bursting the song beyond its edge. In a diary entry dated July 10, 2016, before playing a show in Texas, she wrote, “I chose the right people. I chose the band,” and then commented on the necessity of busting out of her solitary comfort zone: “This is what life is—doing things.”

Stepping out into the world (virtually, at least) in 2020, she has lent her voice to a We Have Rights video campaign on how to document ICE arrests, and recently joined an event with prisoner rights initiative Gasping for Justice, during which she recited a sworn statement from an inmate in Maryland with COVID-19. The question that most animates her right now, she said, is: “Am I being helpful?”

Fiona said starting a band had encouraged her to engage with people more after decades in self-appointed quarantine, and she stressed that Fetch the Bolt Cutters is the result of the deep, active collaborations she’s fostered with her bandmates. But like the album’s spirit of controlled chaos, her negotiations between solitude and collaboration are not cleanly resolved. Nor did conversation with her ever feel calculating or neatly tied. Like her songs, it felt charged by an uncommon generosity, full of honesty and abandon.

Pitchfork: Fetch the Bolt Cutters sounds less manicured than most popular music. How would you describe your relationship to the idea of perfection? And what appealed to you about an album that left in so-called mistakes? I wish I had a word other than “mistakes”...

Fiona Apple: The other word you could use for it is: “aliveness.” I didn’t really have a choice in not putting in messy stuff. I struggle a lot with feeling like I’m not a real musician. I know a lot of musicians, and they’re all music heads. I don’t know a lot about music. I don’t know how to play my instruments very well, honestly. I’m not putting myself down. I can play my own stuff, but I’m not someone you can bring into a studio, like, “Hey, can you play on this?”

I was trying to learn how to be a better musician while making this record. I was recording myself trying. I wasn’t practicing and then recording—I was recording myself while I was trying to get it right. But I liked the way it sounded when I was trying. It felt like a real documentation of what was going on. It felt more honest. And beyond that, I cannot achieve perfection. I just can’t.

I got down on myself a lot, thinking, Everybody’s going to think this sounds stupid! But it came down to: What are you going to do? This is you. This is what you can do. This is the kind of music you can make. And that’s great. The most important thing is that I’m not trying to be anybody other than myself. And this is what I sound like.

How has your relationship to your voice changed over the years?

My relationship to my voice has changed so much since I was a kid. When I was younger I felt like I wasn’t a singer, so on everything that I sang, I hoped my vocals sounded really beautiful. Now I’m not so worried. I have fun with my voice now. I feel like I have something now that I always wanted, which is that I would see old people who were singers singing, and they wouldn’t feel stressed and they weren’t trying to sound good. It was just, “I’m going to sing, and what comes out is my voice.” I don’t feel like I’m such a great singer, like a beautiful voice, but I feel like I’m good at playing my voice. It’s just another instrument now. But it’s the best instrument. It makes so many noises.

You do so many things with your voice on this album, from speak-singing to screaming to the surreal choral layers of “For Her.” What was pushing you in those directions?

There was this game I used to play when I was a kid at the breakfast table where I would pretend to take my voice box out and put it in a jar. And then I’d pretend to put a different voice box in and I’d talk or sing in another voice. I’ve always liked playing with my voice—experimenting with speaking from the back of my throat, to the front of my throat, to whining and nasal, and chest and head voice, trying to make sounds in different ways. It’s much like how my dog gets into doing different voices: She’ll bark and she’ll discover that she can bark really high, and then she’ll start doing it over and over again. You can tell that she’s just enjoying herself because she’s not doing it at anything.

When I do background vocals, I never plan what I’m going to sing. I just press record and sing along. It all comes from improvisation, and then I take out the parts that don’t work. At the end of “For Her,” there was some kind of endurance test that I was acting out. I was sweating and shaking while I was doing those vocals, as though I were getting rid of toxins inside me.

What inspired that visceral, unexpected shape you contort your voice into at the end of “I Want You to Love Me”?

It was probably a reaction to a mistake. I knew I wanted to start speeding up at the end of the song, but my fingers started to slip, and it was falling apart. I make very, very strange sounds without meaning to if I think about things that embarrass me, which is very often. They’re not pretty sounds. So I think that was sort of a musical extension of “I fucked up.”

But the other day I was thinking about my sister’s dead dog, Ada, and I realized I am absolutely doing an impression of Ada at the end of that song. Whenever my sister was away and then she’d come back, Ada would get so excited that she would go [high-pitched yelp]. And I used to do that all the time when I’d see my sister, as in, “I’m excited to see you.” So maybe it was subconscious: “You’re back. I love you.” Because I never made that sound other than imitating Ada.

Self-reliance and independence have always been prominent themes in your lyrics, but to be releasing music where you’re making almost every single decision yourself—how does that feel?

At least since the last album, [2012’s The Idler Wheel…], I haven’t had to ask anybody’s permission for anything. I just sat in my house, thought a lot, made plans. And it feels really good. Even the interviews that I’ve done: None were set up through a publicist—I don’t have a publicist. When my first album came out, I would spend nine hours at some long table with a pitcher of water and people would be coming in, one after the other, and photo shoots were also nine hours long. I would never be able to do that again. I didn’t have to do even one one-hundredth of that this time. I’m not doing anything that I don’t want to do.

With this record—I haven’t looked at stuff, but I know it was received well. Knowing that, and knowing how many fuck ups there are, and how imperfect everything is on it—I feel like I’m in a good relationship with the world. I feel like I showed up for a date with no makeup on, like I banged my head and I lost my tooth and I showed up bloody and wearing half a T-shirt and one sock, and my date went, “Hey, I like you, come on let’s go. That’s OK with me.” Which is a great feeling. I’ll still kick myself for not being the kind of musician that I think is the cool way to be a musician. But I like that I finally went: “I’m me. I’m going to accept what I am and try to make something good out of that.” I’m proud of myself for getting to a place where I could say: “don’t wait until you’re perfect.”

What made you want to revisit scenes from your childhood, like on “Shameika”?

So much of not just this album, but the inside of my mind, is about: Who I am now compared to who I was in elementary school? How much of the goodness did I keep, and how much of the goodness did I lose? How can I get it back? What did I learn back then that I wish I didn’t learn? What did I learn back then that I need to hold onto? Shameika telling me I had potential was this moment in a day that just pierced through.

Everything I write in that song is true—is literal, actually. I crack up thinking, Does anybody wonder what I’m talking about? “Slapping my leg with a riding crop”? I took horseback riding lessons, but even when I wasn’t riding, I would take the riding crop with me when I walked to school. This is horrible, but I remember being a kid and wearing a skirt uniform, and when the wind would blow our skirts up, the doormen would be like [laughs suggestively]. So I started walking to school with my riding crop, and if they would say anything to me, I would just look ’em in the eye and slap my leg with my riding crop and just keep on walking. I wanted to look tough.

Where was your urge for toughness coming from?

I’ve always been pretty feisty. I’m really short and small and I felt vulnerable a lot. So I was going to make sure that I also cultivated a toughness in me. I used to get so frustrated because, when you’re little and you’re tough, people go, [condescendingly] “Oh, you’re a tough little cutie.” When I was a kid, if you pinched my cheek, I would slap your face. I hated being treated like a child even when I was a child.

In “Shameika,” when you sing, “Hurricane Gloria in Excelsis Deo/That’s my bird in my tree,” what’s that about?

Again, literal. Hurricane Gloria was my bird. She was a little parakeet, and I named her Gloria the Hurricane Pilot because I got her around the time of Hurricane Gloria in New York. And we had a ficus tree in my house that my mom named Excelsis Deo so that when we let Gloria fly around, she would land in Excelsis Deo. And we could say, “It’s Gloria in Excelsis Deo!”

That is incredible.

It was funny to me: “That’s my bird in my tree!” Gloria died when I was in Las Vegas visiting my dad. I was just a little kid. I remember my mom called to talk to us, and I knew it. I said: “Gloria is dead.” And it was true.

There is a dreamlike, unexpected coda at the end of “Relay” where you sing, “I used to go to the Ferris wheel every morning just to throw my anger out the door.” Where did that come from?

Like many things on the album, that was something that I improvised because the mic was still on. I’m not exaggerating when I say that every single time I had to press the button on the computer to record, I was shaking. Just by myself. No matter how many times I did it. So I tried not to do it. If I could just keep it recording for a while, then I would start to feel comfortable, like, “Maybe if I start singing, it’ll turn into something.”

At the end of “Relay,” I just started to say what was on my mind. Then I stopped because I thought I had fucked up—I was like, “Going up to the Ferris wheel to throw your anger out the door—that doesn’t make sense,” so I just stopped. But that line is true. Around the time of recording Extraordinary Machine, I used to get up every morning and walk to the Santa Monica Pier, which is like two and a half miles away, to be first in line on the Ferris wheel. And I’d go on by myself. When I got up to the top I’d try and take all the anger that I had about shit and just get rid of it. And I’d try to somehow take something good instead and put it in me, and then go back down the Ferris wheel. And then go home. I used to do that every day until they stopped letting you ride on the Ferris wheel by yourself.

They stopped letting you ride the Ferris wheel alone?

Yeah. Nobody was there, but they were like, “There needs to be more than one person in the car.” I was like, “I’m not going to do this now. I don’t want to sit in there with that guy.”

What is it about being in a band that feels so exciting to you?

It’s the feeling like you’re accepted into something, and you’re included, and you’re wanted there, and you have something to contribute, and you make things better by being there. I mean, anybody would want to feel that way. I can’t imagine anybody being like, “I don’t want to be in a band.” It felt lonely to not be in a band. Everybody I know is in a bunch of different bands, and I wasn’t in any. It makes you feel like you’ve got a family. My band now are the immediate family I made. Instead of having sons and daughters or a husband, I’ve got my hus-band: Sebastian’s my hus-band because he’s always playing with me no matter who I’m playing with.

I trust the people in my band more than I trust most people. I trust them musically. I trust them with my heart. I trust them with my secrets. They’re genuinely kind, glowing people. They mean everything to me. I feel really safe being in a band with them because I can make mistakes and I don’t have to worry about feeling like a fool. I don’t have to worry about them making fun of anything I say or do, or even being sarcastic. I needed to feel some kind of unshakability within my own feelings of vulnerability.

In the New Yorker story from March, your bassist Sebastian talked about the idea of a band being an organism rather than a group of people. What appealed to you about that?

When we’re improvising and playing to each other, it feels like responding to tiny, tiny stimuli, and you can feel what somebody else is feeling. As opposed to just playing a part, everybody is listening to everybody else and trying to say what they’re saying at the same time. For me, it’s a way of taking the pressure of conventional band-dom out of it so that we can just enjoy each other and do fucking music and have there not be a right answer or a wrong answer, or “this doesn’t belong here” or “that doesn’t belong there.” No, everything belongs here because I belong here.

In every other area of life, I have trouble with decisions and trouble with how I feel. But with music, I feel like I always know my path. As long as it feels like me, I’m good. I think I have pretty fucking good intuition.

[to her dog Mercy] Hi baby. [Mercy licks Fiona’s face] She loves my peppermint lip stuff and can’t get enough.

Can I ask Mercy a question—Mercy, how do you stay in touch with your intuition?

[to Mercy] Mercy? How do you stay in touch with your intuition? I don’t know if Mercy should trust her intuition because her intuition always tells her that every other dog has better food than her and that every cat is going to kill her and that every horse is trying to get my attention away from her. She just has to bark at everybody.

How about you? Is there anything you’ve done throughout your life to stay in touch with your intuition?

I know I’ve fallen out of touch with my intuition plenty of times. I know that being fucked up all the time doesn’t help you with your intuition. I always try to ask myself: Do I believe this? I try to locate this place way deep at the bottom of me and see if it pings when I ask it. I guess that’s trusting your gut.

I remember being told: “When there is agitation, look where there is no agitation.” So if you have agitation inside, then go and look at a tree. It’s not agitated. It’s doing what it needs to do. Go and watch the ants work when they’re gathering crumbs. Just look at something that’s working and let it ground you.

I have this thing sometimes where Mercy talks to me. She’ll come up to me and start kissing me and she’ll be looking me in the eye, and I’ll look at her and try to imagine what she’s saying. And sometimes it just flows out. I’ll be like, “Zelda, do you know what Mercy just told me? She told me that I’ve been worrying about this thing for way too long. And that’s why I have such a strain on this and that.” I know that I said it, but it only comes to me through her eyes.

You began meditating a decade ago and have said that Fetch the Bolt Cutters closer “On I Go” was influenced by that practice. How else has meditation influenced your music?

Meditation is about letting things arise and fall away again—and not judging the thoughts that are in your mind, but just letting them go by. This was a huge deal for me when I first started meditating. OCD has different manifestations in everybody, but for me at the time, it was a lot of invasive thoughts. You keep on thinking the same things over and over, and they’re bad things. You think it’s what you’re made of. You think you’re making a choice to think those things, and you feel guilty for thinking about them over and over again: Why can’t I get past these thoughts? But it’s like a vinyl record—you’ve gone around these thoughts so many times that it’s made this groove. And it’s so hard not to identify yourself with all the nasty things in your brain. You end up running away from things, or a lot of drinking or drugs to try to numb memories or feelings. And then underneath it all, the same groove is still going over and over.

When you’re in that [meditative] space of just observing yourself and observing things as nonjudgmentally as you can, you feel more capable of handling it all, more capable of sorting it all out. And I think that definitely helps with understanding yourself and with communicating, and so therefore with songwriting.

It also taught me to appreciate tiny things, to really see music and rhythm. I’m looking outside right now and there are little berries on this tree that have a little shine on them. Lots of people now are saying they’ve got synesthesia. I have heard the theory that it’s because when you’re just forming, all of your senses are wrapped up together. When you start to develop, the wires separate, but for some people they never get separated. So in some sense, I feel like being able to appreciate the beauty and the multifacetedness of any tiny, simple thing weaves everything back together for me. It feels like understanding. It’s very peaceful.

“Heavy Balloon” is full of food metaphors: strawberries, peas, and beans. What drew you to that imagery?

I’m convinced that there is a metaphor for everything in nature. You can depend on how things work in nature. And strawberries and peas and beans all sound very uplifting and positive. “Heavy Balloon” is describing the sadness, the depression, but then don’t forget: Even when it looks like I’m down and nothing’s happening and nothing’s growing, I am growing. It might take some time, but I’m growing. Maybe you can’t see it, but it’s happening.

Do you have a relationship with poetry these days?

I don’t have a huge relationship to poetry, but when I come across poetry that gets me, it gets me, and I love the idea of a poem, of all of the power that can go into a space between two words or a repetition of one word, these tiny things that can mean so much and feel so huge. My singing self was born out of singing Maya Angelou poems to myself at night going to sleep.

Do you remember which Maya Angelou poems you would sing to yourself?

Well, a very relevant one to now is “Still I Rise.” I remember singing part of one that went, “Pickin ’em up, and layin’ them down, getting to the next town baby.”

How else would you describe your relationship to language?

There was this book that I once bought like 15 copies of that I love so much: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. But I have this horrible thing where I don’t retain information that I read. I read War and Peace and I don’t remember it—though I do remember some of the names. I got War and Peace because I read this article about the old Russian couple who did the translation. They translated a bunch of different books, and I just thought that was the sweetest life: you and your spouse poring over these classic works of literature, and talking about it and interpreting it together, like, “How do we say this the right way?” That’s a really beautiful romantic life.

Do you still believe in romantic love?

I do. I love seeing anybody in a good relationship. But I don’t see that and want it for myself so much. I honestly have no interest in romance these days. I hope that’s not me somewhere underneath being like, “It’s too painful to love,” because I don’t like that. I don’t get with that way of thinking of, “I’ve been hurt before, so I’m not going to do it again.” You’re new every time. Still, I’ve never been somebody who was like, “I feel comfortable when I have a boyfriend.” I just really want to be around the person.

Speaking of masters of language, you played piano on Bob Dylan’s new album Rough and Rowdy Ways. How did that come about?

So I’m sitting here with Zelda in February, really relaxed, and we’re about to have dinner, and I look down at my phone and see [longtime collaborator] Blake Mills texting me. I hadn’t heard from Blake in months. And he’s like, “So I’m working on something, I can’t tell anybody about it, but we want you to come in and do something.” And I was like, “Um, I can’t I’m busy.” And he was like, “Can I call you?” So he called me and he goes, “OK, it’s Bob Dylan. Bob is asking if you will come here and record.” And I went: “When?” And he went: “Now.” And I said “FUCK” so loud that I could hear people on the other end of the phone laughing.

I was like, “I’m not trying to put myself down here, Blake, but you and I both know that I’m very underqualified for this job. There’s no point.” And he’s like, “He just wants you to come in to be you.” So I went in the next day. I’m only on “Murder Most Foul.”

Only!

I couldn’t believe it. I had met him many years ago, but I don’t really know why I’m on the record. I was there a total of like seven hours. I told Bob I was really insecure about it, and he was really encouraging and nice. He was just like, “You’re not here to be perfect, you’re here to be you.” To have Bob Dylan say that before my record came out was a huge deal for me. And I mean, this was like the one person I could have met who’s alive right now where it actually would have meant something to me as a kid.

What did his music mean to you back then?

When my stepfather was moving into our apartment—I was probably 10—we cleaned out his apartment to bring his stuff over. That was the day that I discovered his pot. And that was also the day that I discovered his records. One of the records I discovered was Bob Dylan’s Desire, and that’s my favorite. If I were to put that record on now, I would feel too many emotions. I would feel too alive. I’d be afraid to listen to it. That happens to me with music a lot. That’s probably why I don’t listen to a lot of music. Because when it’s really good, it’s like I feel it too much.

I loved Desire so much—I mean, Christ, it was probably even my first small education into racial injustice because of the song “Hurricane.” And on the song “Isis,” he sort of gave me my sexual awakening a little bit. When he goes, “She said, ‘You look different,’ I said, ‘Well, I guess”/[...] She said, ‘You going to stay?’ I said, ‘If you want me to, yes’”—when he says “Well, I guess,” I was like: ooooh.

When I would fake being sick and stay home from school, which was most of the time, as soon as everybody would leave, I’d put on my roller skates and skate around the house. My little ritual was putting on “Like a Rolling Stone” and roller skating around the dining room table 88 times for the number of keys on the piano. When I met Bob Dylan at the Grammys, twentysomething years ago, I told him about the roller skating thing.

I have spent many years wondering about that photo of you and Bob Dylan together at the Grammys in 1997.

I was at the Grammys, I think, and [longtime manager] Andy [Slater] said, “Fiona, c’mere c’mere, Bob Dylan wants to meet you.” And I was like, “What?” I went over and stood with him and told him that story, and somebody took a picture. I’m wearing a brown dress with apples on it, and I got that from Ella Fitzgerald’s estate sale. It was a skirt of hers, and I wore it as a dress. So I’m in Ella Fitzgerald’s skirt made into a dress, standing with Bob Dylan.

I’ve read that you would play Ella Fitzgerald’s songs as a child. Do you feel like her singing influenced yours? It’s so rhythmic.

I’m sure that she did. I listened to music so much up until the time I started writing my own. And then I just didn’t so much anymore. I loved Ella Fitzgerald. I loved Joan Armatrading, I loved Cyndi Lauper, I loved Harry Belafonte, I loved Bob Dylan, I loved Miriam Makeba, I loved Jack Teagarden. If I listen to any of the ones I really loved, I get so overwhelmed still.

My record player is not plugged in, but I have a Miriam Makeba vinyl on my wall up there, and I recently went and bought three other records that are really important to me: Alice Coltrane, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana; Kate Bush, The Kick Inside, and Joan Armatrading, To the Limit. If I had to pick one record that’s closest to me from when I was a kid, it’s To the Limit. I feel like it influenced me a lot.

What about Joan Armatrading’s music impacted you?

I love her singing style, I love her voice, I love the way she says things. I got really hooked in by the song “You Rope You Tie Me” and this one part where she goes, “You’re a lion in my path/In my light/’Scuuuuuse me,” she just says “’scuuuuse me” with gritted teeth. It was her performance of that song that I was like: “I really hear this woman. She’s getting through to me.”

She was playing in New York like 10 or 15 years ago, an outdoor show down by one of the piers. I was just walking by and I heard her, so I went and I watched Joan Armatrading by myself. I tried to make a video when she started doing “You Rope You Tie Me,” and I got tapped by the guard telling me to stop filming. In that moment I felt such closeness and empathy for all the people I’ve seen at my shows getting told “don’t film that” “don’t interrupt.” You’re like, “I’m sorry!” I felt so ashamed.

You reference Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” on the song “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” How did you first get into her?

When I was 11, I became good friends with my brother’s girlfriend Lisa. She was six feet tall and she used to have a mohawk that was like a foot tall. We spent a whole summer in L.A. together. She worked at a video store, and they paid me under the counter. They started doing this prank where, anytime anybody would try to rent porn, they would send me up [to get the tape]. So I’d go on the ladder to get Debbie Does Dallas, Debbie Does...—Debbie did so many places. I was constantly on this ladder, like, “OK, here!” We eventually got fired in an epic water fight—I got caught in the bathroom making spit balls, and we spilled shit all over the computers and just ran out of there. And Lisa introduced me to Kate Bush. I remember sitting on the kitchen counter at my brother’s house and hearing “Babooshka” for the first time. I used to sing and play a bunch of her songs from The Kick Inside at my piano when I was a kid: “Feel It” and “Moving” and “The Kick Inside” and “Wuthering Heights.”

Now you’re the one who’s an influence on younger artists: A few years ago, Solange wrote in an essay that she was the President of the Fiona Apple Fan Club growing up. And Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee said she had a photo of you hanging in the studio while working on her most recent album. How aware are you of your influence?

I don’t think I’m very aware of it. But it absolutely delights me. You know, in the song “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” I say, “a girl can roll her eyes at me and kill” and that’s absolutely true. But the opposite is also true. If other girls like me, I’m like: “Let’s be best friends!” If somehow I’m actually helping another woman or girl do what she wants to do, and express herself and feel good about that—it makes me feel like I’m in a band with them. And I love that.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ title track is so musically spare and cracked-open. Does the minimalism of the song add to its message?

It was a really crack-open point. I wrote “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” and “Newspaper” after we all thought we were done recording. It doesn’t take me a long time to write things. It’s just the time surrounding the writing that takes all these years. If I’m not in the mood or I don’t put deadlines on myself, I’m not rushing to do anything, so it takes as long as it wants to take.

But I felt at that point like: “No, I’m not done. This record is not done. I need to say some more things.” I sat on the floor next to my piano, and I felt like I was looking at the floor for two days. I wrote the words out almost like a stream of consciousness, except that I was thinking thinking thinking thinking thinking. For “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” and “Newspaper,” I didn’t have music to go with them. I just had the two percussion tracks, and I wrote words to fit with the rhythms. But I didn’t come up with any melody or chords to go with it. I wanted to get on the microphone and just do it. A lot of it sounds like I’m speak-singing. That’s just how it came out. It felt right. It was like I had found me.

Actually, there are some chords I put into “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” but I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to do C-A-G-E-D, “caged.” I had the title of the album for like three years, but when I wrote the song, it kind of acted out the fetching of the bolt cutters for me, and the cutting of the bolts. So I think that, for that reason, it feels like it’s me. It’s where I was born.

What were you releasing yourself from?

A lot of it is about allowing somebody to have power over you. It’s hard to talk about. I started reading about how things that happened to you many, many years ago can take a long time to process, especially if you’ve been numbing yourself for a long time. I didn’t know that before. I thought I was just keeping myself trapped in feelings and flashbacks and nightmares—feeling trapped by the way somebody tells you who you are, getting isolated with somebody who doesn’t have your best interests at heart. And they manipulate you, and they lie to you. When you love somebody, you believe them when they tell you who you are.

People get their hooks in you by being very loving at first. And you tell them about your weaknesses and your insecurities, and they ended up using it as ammunition against you. They use it to make you feel small so that you don’t leave. And even when you do leave, years later you still believe the things they said about you. I needed to stop believing that stuff. And it’s really hard sometimes. When you’re young, people can really get into your brain. I was also mad at myself for trying to make peace and be friends and ingratiate myself to someone, because I was afraid of them, and because I wanted them to stop.

There’s always little messages in my songs—to a person here, a person there. If I try to talk to somebody about something, and they will not talk to me, what I have to say will end up in a song. It will be veiled in certain ways. But there will be something that only that person will understand.

How deep rooted is all of this? How long did you feel stuck?

Well, it’s not just one thing—so, 20 to 30 years? I feel like I understand so much more now than I did when I was writing these songs. But if there’s more to think about, then there’s more to write about, and then that gives me more to do, and that’s good for life.

You also got a tattoo of bolt cutters. When you see it now, what does it symbolize to you?

It’s the same thing tattoos give anybody, which is this idea that: I made me. I claim my body. I can do what I want to my body. In some sense it was an act of faith in myself because I got the tattoo before the record came out. So people could have hated it and it could have been a disaster, but I wasn’t going to wait to find that out before I tattooed it on myself, because it doesn’t matter what everybody else makes of it. What matters is that I did this. It was my own stamp of approval on myself. And it’s a reminder: “You got out of this situation. What’s the next barrier you got to get through?” It also goes back to Extraordinary Machine. I am the bolt cutters, an extraordinary machine. I can get myself free anytime. Plus, I just like how it looks. I’ve only gotten three tattoos in my life.

What are your other tattoos?

On the back of my neck, I’ve got my pets names: Janet, Nancy, and Mercy. And I have what they call a “tramp stamp,” but it looks cool. I got that tattoo for [ex-boyfriend] David Blaine, and for myself, because he had gotten a tattoo of my name on his shoulder, which is now covered up with the face of the devil, and I felt like I needed to do something in return. But I didn’t feel right getting “David” tattooed on me. I felt like we were kin, and he’s always going to be in my family. So it’s this symbol that I used to draw when I was a kid, and above it I put, “Kin.” But it’s half removed now, because another boyfriend didn’t want me to have it. It’s a faded tattoo now.

How do you balance anger with forgiveness? A lot of your earlier songs are animated by anger, but there are so many complex interpersonal dynamics playing out on this album.

It’s hard to just forgive somebody. Everyone is like, “If you don’t forgive, you’re only hurting yourself,” but it’s very difficult. You can only really balance anger and forgiveness if you have the fulcrum—something to balance them on. The person you’re angry at needs to show you something new and different of themselves. I don’t really even think I do forgive anything. I just accept it, because of the things that I’ve added on—like a new impression of the person that can help you look at the bad stuff in a new light.

But things that are in the past, like cheating—I don’t care about any of that shit anymore. I don’t get mad at the other woman. My dad was a big cheater. He cheated on his wife with my mom, and then he cheated on my mom with a bunch of people. And my grandmother’s husband cheated on her. And I’ve heard them talk about the women, and I just always thought it was not, as they say, a good look. It just seemed wrong, like, “Why aren’t you mad at the guy?” Anyway, I can forgive that stuff. It doesn’t matter to me anymore.

The stuff that’s happened to me that has left scars, by people who will not acknowledge those things and will not talk to me, I will not forgive those things. But I think writing the songs is me trying to get to a place where I can forgive, not because I want to feel good with them, but because I just want to get past it.

I don’t want to be dishonest—there’s a lot of stuff that I’m still working out. But I do feel like I’m in a better place than I ever have been, even though a lot of it is scary and unfamiliar.

The song “Under the Table” is about being dragged to a fancy event and then proceeding to say your piece there. You told NPR that this was a real dinner and the prominent figurehead of a major streaming service was present. It made me curious how you feel about the economy of music now.

The funny thing about that song is that one of the people at that dinner who I had a problem with is now making more money off that song than I am: Some guy from Spotify was there, and I don’t know how they do what they do to us. It doesn’t make any sense. Wasn’t Napster supposed to be like, “That’s not allowed, don’t do that.” And then they’re like, “Let us do it! You don’t get to steal! We get to steal!” It’s fucked up. I know I make less than they do off of work that I do, and I’ve never met them, and they don’t do shit for me.

I’ve never been to a dinner like that before or since, where there’s like six wine glasses in a row out for each person, and they’re tasting so many expensive wines. They open one $900 bottle of wine and let everybody sip it, and then they give you another glass. And everybody was talking about their accomplishments. We were all supposed to say something, and when it got to me, I was like: “Hi I’m Fiona Apple. I think it would be interesting if we talked a bit about what was going on in the world when each one of these wines was made.” I thought that would be a great conversation for fuckin’ rich people to have over expensive wines: What can this group of smart people do with that kind of conversation? Maybe something productive? No, let’s just talk about the idiot book we wrote. Anyway I can’t believe I’m still getting pissed off at that dinner. [laughs] But it’s nice to have your say.

I was so struck by how funny “Under the Table” and the song “Rack of His” are when I first heard the album.

I would bet that if I went back and listened to all my old stuff, I would find a lot of things that at least I thought were really funny.

I always thought “Limp,” from 1999’s When the Pawn..., was so funny. Did you think a line like “it won’t be long till you’ll be lying limp in your own hands” was funny at the time?

I did. I thought it was a takedown, but a funny takedown. I used to love Dixie Carter on Designing Women. She used to give these big, smart speeches where she’d tell people off, but they’d be funny. You get your point across a lot better with a little bit of humor. And so much of humor is just familiarity, being able to relate to something. It’s a good way to communicate.

This fall you sent me a photo of four notebooks you found from the late ’90s, around the time you were making When the Pawn, which you didn’t know you had. Have you been able to bring yourself to read them?

I started looking at one of them, but I can’t. I saw one cute, funny thing, and then I saw some ways I was talking about myself, and it was hard to look at. There was a lot of self-blaming. I just didn’t want to have to encounter myself like that again. My mom gave me her diary from when she was 17, and I was thinking I was going to read them both side by side. I don’t think I want to do that anymore.

But who knows? I was so glad to have found them, but it’ll be a while—I just feel like it’s going to bring up too much. I’m afraid of getting really angry. I don’t like feeling angry. I really don’t. I have a great capacity to feel anger, but I do not like it at all. I’m all for analyzing things and for bettering yourself and getting past things, but at a certain point, I just need distraction. That’s why I’m so pro TV. Distraction is sometimes the best medicine when something gets too heavy and just hurts too much. I really have no problem distracting myself. I know I’ll come back to it when I’m OK.

What would you tell the version of yourself in those notebooks now?

Find a friend. Listen to a different voice than that one voice you’re hearing. Find somebody else to talk to. Let somebody in. Tell somebody. Hear what somebody else has to say about this. Don’t be isolated.

When the Pawn’s title poem has always been so important to me, especially its central line, “There’s no body to batter when your mind is your might.” That’s a really powerful idea, but it’s also maybe at odds with the idea of seeking out another perspective. Where was it coming from?

At the time I was thinking about a boxer physically going into the ring. My dad used to have fight nights all the time, so we’d seen a bunch of boxing matches. I used to always try to guess who was going to win just by the way they looked at each other. Sometimes they come in and really try to psych you out, like, “I’m so tough.” But other times, somebody will come in and they don’t need to try anything at all because they know they’re going to win. It was so cool to be like, “I know that guy’s going to win when the bell rings because I saw that look in his eyes.”

Really what I meant, which I thought at the time, is that who you are in your mind is something they can’t break. If you know who you are—if you have a connection to that very deep, dark place with that little light that goes on every time—then you’re OK. It’s not all you need, but it’s what you need to start with.

Was there a moment in your life when you realized that emotions were worth taking seriously?

I always knew. I grew up with that being what the truth was. I think nowadays there’s a lot of people who write about feelings seriously, and they always have. But I don’t remember feeling like I had that much company back when I started. At least I don’t remember being aware. It felt a little harder. I felt like I needed to be brave in order to keep doing it. Certainly there is not the stigma there once was to being an emotional person.

How has your idea of being a musician changed over the years?

I used to feel really embarrassed about the memory of when I first asked my mom to give me piano lessons. We were living on 162nd Street, and I was sharing a room with my sister. My mom was in her loft bed with Robert, her boyfriend, my soon-to-be stepfather, and I remember waking up in the middle of the night and coming in and standing under their loft bed and yelling up, “Mama, can I have piano lessons?” She said, “OK. Why?” I said, “Because I want to make people happy.” I always thought that was really goofy, and it is, it’s really silly.

But I feel so much closer to that version of why I do music now than I ever have in between. For a long time, I thought, I’m just doing it to make myself feel better. That’s still true: I’m doing it for myself, it’s just a function of the organism that I am. It’s not a career choice, it’s just how I go about life: you write. And anybody who makes a fun pop song that people enjoy, they’re healers. That you give somebody a few minutes of unadulterated joy is so important. It’s all made of love, hopefully.

Have you seen the thing on Tumblr—and I’m sure it’s everywhere—“I don’t know who needs to see this right now, but blah, blah, blah”? I find myself re-blogging those things a lot because I’m like, “Maybe somebody does need to see that, and maybe they follow me, and I can’t turn down the possibility of somebody needing to see that.” Because when you do see something that you need to see, it’s such a relief. I want very badly to be that for whoever I can be that for. I want to be that for my dog, I want to be that for you, I want to be that for the guy across the street, for anybody that I can. That would make everything meaningful.

Has your relationship to solitude changed in recent years?

My relationship to solitude is always going to be really good. But I don’t need it as much as I used to. Maybe in the past, some of my need for all of that solitude was really because I was less confident than I am now. Not that I’m very confident, but I was much less so, especially as a musician. I mean, hell, last Thursday I was on my way home from playing with the band, and it dawned on me: I had gone in, sat down, and “jammed.” I’ve never been somebody who felt OK to jam. I never felt like I could keep up. I never felt like I had good ideas. It would always make me sad when everybody would start to jam because I felt like if I jumped in I would make a mistake and feel bad and shy away. Now, I’ve become a little more sure of myself, and that makes it easier to invite other people in.

Where do you feel your newfound confidence has come from?

When I was drinking, I felt so guilty and ashamed of myself all the time. You could be mad at me about something, and I would think I was guilty no matter what. I’d be on their side—against me. But then I stopped [in 2018] and I just felt more in control, like I can stand by my choices: picking takes, picking instruments, all of those kinds of things. And I know when I’m right.

And I’m getting support. Zelda is a really, really great friend. She should be credited a lot with helping to get this record finished. She was really championing me and helping me through some traumatic memories, and with such wisdom. The band and Zelda have contributed greatly to my confidence. And my dog, believe it or not. When I was adopting her, I was like, “This dog is too much for me. She’s going to need too much attention and exercise and she’s really smart.” But there was this part of me that was like, “No, I am the person that can do all that.” I made this bet with myself: I can be the person to match up with this dog. I can get up everyday, and match minds. I look at Mercy like she’s the coolest lady in the world. And she chooses to be next to me.

What have you learned from the dogs in your life?

They’re aren’t so many things I’ve learned from dogs, but they’re the most important things. A lot of it is what people say their kids do for them, but you don’t need to have a kid for that. With dogs, all you need to do is watch them, and you’re happy. They’re funny and smart or silly. Mercy is very emotionally intelligent. You see the wheels turning when something is going on. I could go out into the yard and cry by myself, and Zelda’s dog Maddie will find me and lean on me with that big body, like, “I’m sittin with you lady. I got you.” And I just don’t believe it—how did she know!

When I first stopped drinking, I was having lots of panic attacks. I didn’t go to a rehab but I rented a little apartment and went to see a doctor every day, and I brought Mercy with me. It was just me and Mercy for a month. Often she would come over and lay her body on top of me, to ground me, and just wouldn’t move. They make you feel important, which is good for mental health for everybody. They look at you and they need you and you’re their person. Every morning, when Mercy and I go running, there’s always a certain point where she looks up at me, and she’s like: “This is so fun. I love this. Isn’t this so fun? I love you.” And there’s just nothing better.

We want to go and buy some land and that’s just going to be dogs and dogs and dogs. If nobody sees me for the next few years, just know I will be with dogs.

Videos by Irina Rozovsky

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork