The Looming Effect And The Parallax View

Fiona Apple “Ladies”

The big frustrating thing about loving Fiona Apple’s music is that she takes so long between records, but the immediately apparent thing about her new album Fetch the Bolt Cutters is that these particular songs simply couldn’t exist as they do without all that time for reflection and emotional processing. Whereas most of her old songs seemed like documents of raw emotions in the moment, the new songs are written with the perspective of memoir. But this isn’t self-mythologizing – she’s writing about her life with a critical eye, and in reflecting on the past she allows herself to shake off some of the burden of its weight on her psyche. The title phrase is her metaphor for cutting your way out of a trap you’ve made for yourself, and she’s singing this all as a woman who’s already made it out.

I love the way the record is sequenced in thematic clusters, and how an idea set up in one song is expanded on from another angle in the one right after it. My favorite example of this is in the “Newspaper”/”Ladies” diptych at the center of the album, in which Apple considers the social obstacles placed between women who’ve been romantically involved with the same men. “Newspaper” approaches this with suspicion and anger – “I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me to make sure that we’ll never be friends” – as well as an admission of envy and obsession. Like a lot of the songs on the album, it’s in some way her noting in retrospect how she fell into a trap and making a note of it for future use, as though she’s an emotional cartographer letting us all know where to expect treacherous terrain. That song is fraught and tense, but it’s resolved somewhat by “Ladies,” which considers this dilemma with a looser sound, a more relaxed state of mind, and a lyrical emphasis on empathy and generosity. She still finds herself cut off from these seemingly great women she wishes she could know firsthand, but she at least has shed the angst and jealousy.

There’s a lot of levity in the verses of “Ladies,” and lots of vivid images and details that she sings with delightfully off-kilter rhythms and cadences. Apple, as always, is a genius of phrasing with a very distinctive style, and as deliberate as she is in writing these meticulous lyrics and melodies, it all rolls out so fluidly that it feels more intuitive and improvisational. The refrain in which she calls herself a “fruit bat” in a sweet melody at the top of her vocal range is an unexpected contrast that further lightens the mood of the song, but that moves straight into a more solemn bridge where she arrives the song’s magnanimous conclusion: “Nobody can replace anybody else, so it would be a shame to make it a competition / And no love is like any other love, so it would be insane to make a comparison with you.” It’s basically the moral of the story, and she makes a point of singing it plainly and with direct language. But as much as she believes this very reasonable thought, the song doesn’t stop at this realization and honors the feeling rather than just “solving” it. The ending circles back to the premise of both “Newspaper” and this song, as she simply repeats the phrase “yet another woman to whom I won’t get through” with a steadily deepening degree of disappointment.

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