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Fiona Apple's Long-Delayed LP Slotted For October 4 Release
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Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Songs Leaked On The Radio
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Whatever Happened To Fiona Apple? Online Campaign Tries To Find Out
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Apple dated film director Paul Thomas Anderson ("Magnolia") for three years and recorded a cover of the Beatles' "Across the Universe" for the "Pleasantville" soundtrack, for which he directed a trippy video. But other than moving to the sparsely furnished apartment in Venice after their breakup and showing up for her weekly Tuesday lunches with Pawn producer Jon Brion, there was no new music.
At some point, Brion suggested the pair get to work on new material. "He said that a bunch of times ... like, 'Um, so are you writing anything?' And I'd go, 'No!' " Pieces of songs began to come together and Brion became more insistent and offered to record the songs whenever Apple felt up to it. "I needed a kick in the ass anyway," Apple joked. "Otherwise ... 10 years would have went by if I was left to do it on my own time."
Apple, unafraid to call herself "lazy" when it comes to writing and recording, was lucky to have Brion to push her along. On Pawn, the singer said she and Brion developed a symbiotic relationship, in which she would record her vocals and piano and leave and then Brion would spend the next 10 hours assembling a song.
But this time, like so many of the affairs Apple writes about, one of the partners had that dead look in their eye, and, for once, it wasn't the guy. The pair turned Extraordinary Machine in to Apple's label in mid-2003, and that's where it gets complicated. "It wasn't like, 'Here's the record, it's finished, what do you think?' and they said, 'No,' " Apple said. What she had turned in, she explained, was a partially completed album consisting of tracks that were not yet finished.
"I don't know what happened in my brain [during the sessions with Brion], but I pretty much just checked out on him. [By the] middle of the album ... I didn't know how to say what I liked or didn't like." Sensing Brion's frustration and recognizing her own reluctance, a deep freeze set in. "I think that also I was starting to realize what was going to come after this thing was done and I really wasn't sure I wanted to do this anymore," Apple said.
Cue the "long, drawn out" panic attack.
Rumors began floating that Sony had rejected the album in May 2003 and refused to release it until Apple came back with a more market-friendly single. A release date was initially set for September 2003, then it was moved to early 2004, then February 2005.
Reports about the album depicted it as an eclectic mix of vaudeville, jazz, cabaret and processed beats. Mysteriously, "Extraordinary Machine" leaked onto the Internet in June 2004, followed by a rough mix of "Better Version of Me." Brion spilled the beans in an Entertainment Weekly article in October 2004 in which he said the album was being held up by Sony because the label didn't hear any "obvious" singles. Both Apple and a Sony spokesperson denied that the label shelved the album or asked for a new single, but Apple said, "I don't know if they ever would have released that had I wanted to release it as is."
Enter superfan Dave Muscato. A longtime admirer, Muscato was so incensed by the Extraordinary holdup that in November 2004 he asked fans to start a letter-writing campaign to Sony to free the album, with his FreeFiona.com as the gathering point. Still, Apple was nowhere to be seen or heard in what was being depicted as a battle between art and commerce.
Muscato and about 40 other fans from around the world held a protest in the bitter cold outside Sony's New York headquarters on January 28, chanting, "Free Fiona!" and wearing red hats in honor of the Machine song "Red, Red, Red."
"Fiona is a great musician and she has a magic touch with her lyrical sense, and we were very unhappy to hear that there was Fiona Apple music out in the world that wasn't available to us," said University of Missouri student Muscato, 21, who plays bass in the rock band SanSerif. Muscato, who, despite convincing fans to send hundreds of apples to Sony's chairman, never heard from the label, said he didn't care what the holdup was, he's just glad it's over.
Which brings us back to where we started.
Sort of.
Little did fans and critics know that Apple had already re-recorded much of the album with another producer.
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Photo: Autumn de Wilde
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