“And I got so upset, I was crying, and I didn’t know how to make myself go on, make myself feel like it was all going to be OK.”īut she did go on, by pushing back against her public image with blunt self-analysis. “I had just sat on the bus and there’s Spin with Bjork on the cover and I picked it up and there were all these terrible letters in reaction to my story-‘She’s the most annoying thing in the world, etc,’” she recounted in the Post profile. Apple composed it on tour, after paging through reader responses to a 1997 Spin cover story, with photos by Terry Richardson and slobbery physical descriptions to match, that had painted her as a pretentious, melodramatic pill. When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He’ll Win the Whole Thing ’Fore He Enters the Ring There’s No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand Then You Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won’t Matter Cuz You’ll Know That You’re Rightĭismissed at the time as a meaningless ploy for attention, the poem is in fact pretty legible (despite the mixed sports metaphors) as a pep talk to a vulnerable person who’s gearing up to defend their unpopular truth in public-and, inevitably, get pilloried for it. Often, she could just as plausibly be speaking to a derisive, judgmental public. Female singer-songwriters are generally presumed to be memoirists, but Apple has always maintained that the songs on this record were composed without any specific, personal incidents in mind. It was hers to shake off, or at least to reshape on her own terms.Īlthough When The Pawn is, on its surface, a suite of 10 songs that dissect embattled loves and unhealthy desires, demonstrating the impossibility of maintaining romantic relationships when you’re always at war with yourself, the “you” to whom Apple addresses so many of her lyrics isn’t necessarily singular. By the time she started composing her second album, Apple had a reputation-as a bitch, a brat, a heroin-chic waif and possible anorexic, a performer who, according to The New York Times, “plays a Lolita-ish suburban party girl” on TV but comes on more like a “shrinking violet” in concert. But her candor didn’t exactly prevent the press or the public from judging her harshly though her notorious “this world is bullshit” speech at the 1997 VMAs constituted a cannier analysis of celebrity culture than most people in the entertainment industry wanted to admit, its messiness suggested that she was still a more eloquent writer than speaker. In its bluntness, Tidal also functioned as a preemptive act of self-defense from a person already accustomed to being misunderstood.Ī legion of new fans, many of them girls younger than Apple (who was 18 at the time of the album’s release), understood her messages of individualism and resilience instinctually. As a hip-hop fan, Apple understood the power of a boast. That remarkable debut contained rejoinders to a fickle lover, a rapist, and anyone foolish enough to write off Apple because she happened to be young or small or female. Great art has been motivated by that same impulse to correct the record-to impress a divergent worldview on those who’d prefer to ignore it, whether that audience numbers two or, in the case of Apple’s first album, 1996’s Tidal, three million. In this, as in so much else, she was precocious.

Tidal album fiona apple