THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020 35
together. “It’s a secret that keeps us con-
nected,” she told me.
Apple was also briefly involved with
the comedian Louis C.K. After the
Times published an exposé of his sex-
ual misconduct, in 2017, she had faith
that C.K. would be the first target of
#MeToo to take responsibility for his
actions, maybe by creating subversive
comedy about shame and compulsion.
When a hacky standup set of his was
leaked online, she sent him a warm note,
urging him to dig deeper.
One of the women C.K. harassed
was Rebecca Corry, a standup come-
dian who founded an advocacy organi-
zation for pit bulls, Stand Up for Pits.
Apple began working with the group,
and, once she got to know Corry, she
started to see C.K. in a harsher light.
The comedy that she’d admired for its
honesty now looked “like a smoke
screen,” she said. In a text, she told me
that, if C.K. wasn’t capable of more se-
vere self-scrutiny, “he’s useless.” She
added, “I SHAKE when I have to think
and write about myself. It’s scary to go
there but I go there. He is so WEAK.”
At times, Apple questioned her abil-
ity to be in any romantic relationship.
Last fall, she went through another
breakup, with a man she had dated for
about a year. “This is my marriage right
now,” she said of her platonic intimacy
with Zelda Hallman. Apple told me that
they’d met in a near-mystical way: while
out on a walk, she’d blown a dandelion,
wishing for a dog-friend for Mercy, then
turned a corner and saw Hallman, walk-
ing Maddie. When Apple’s second ro-
mance with Ames was ending, she started
inviting Hallman to stay over. “I’d have
night terrors and stuff,” Apple recalled.
“And one day I woke up and she was
sitting in the chair—she’d sat there all
night, watching me, making sure I was
O.K. I was feeling safer with her here.”
Apple fantasized about a kind of retire-
ment: in a few years, she and Hallman
might buy land back East “and move
there with the doggies.”
Hallman, an affable, silver-haired les-
bian, grew up poor in Appalachia; after
studying engineering at Stanford, she
worked in the California energy indus-
try. In the mid-aughts, she moved to
L.A. to try filmmaking, getting some
small credits. Each woman called their
relationship balanced—they split ex-
penses, they said—but Hallman’s role
displaced, to some degree, the one Ap-
ple’s brother had played. In addition,
Hallman sat in on our interviews and
at recording sessions; she often took
videos, posting them online. They slept
on the daybeds in the living room. Apple
had made it clear that anyone who ques-
tioned her friend’s presence would get
cut out. Hallman described
their dynamic as like a “Bos-
ton marriage—but in the way
that outsiders had imagined
Boston marriages to be.”
Hallman said that she
hadn’t recognized Apple
when they met. Initially,
she’d mistaken the singer for
someone younger, just an-
other Venice Beach music
hopeful in danger of being
exploited: “I felt relieved when she said
she had a boyfriend in the Hills, to take
care of her.”
“Oh, my God, you were one of them!”
Apple said, laughing.A
fter my July visit, Apple began to
text me. She sent a recording of a
song that she’d heard in a dream, then
a recording describing the dream. She
texted about watching “8 Mile”—“do-
ing the nothing that comes before my
little concentrated spurt of work”—and
about reading a brain study about rap-
pers that made her wonder where her
brain “lit up” when she sang. “I’m hop-
ing that I develop that ability to let my
medial prefrontal cortex blow out the
lights around it!” she joked. Occasion-
ally, she sent a screenshot of a text from
someone else, seeking my interpretation
(a tendency that convinced me she likely
did the same with my texts).
In a video sent in August, she beamed,
thrilled about new mixes that she’d been
struggling to “elevate.” “I always think
of myself as a half-ass person, but, if I
half-assed it, it still sounds really good.”
She added that she’d whispered into the
bathroom mirror, “You did a good job.”
In another video—broken into three
parts—she appeared in closeup, in a white
tank top, free-associating. She described
a colorized photograph from Auschwitz
she’d seen on Tumblr, then moved on to
the frustrations of O.C.D.—how it made
her “freak out about the littlest things,
like infants freak out.” She talked aboutJeffrey Epstein and the comfort of dumb
TV; she held up a “cool metal instru-
ment,” stamped “1932,” that she’d ordered
from Greece. Near the end of the video,
she wondered why she was rambling,
then added, “Oh—I also ate some pot.
I forgot about that. Well, knowing me,
I’ll probably send this to you!”
Apple’s lifelong instinct has been to
default to honesty, even if it
costs her. In an era of slick
branding, she is one of the
last Gen X artists: reflexively
obsessed with authenticity
and “selling out,” disturbed
by the affectlessness of teen-
girl “influencers” hawking
sponcon and bogus uplift.
(When she told an inter-
viewer that she pitied Justin
Bieber’s thirsty request for
fans to stream his new single as they
slept, Beliebers spent the next day
rage-tweeting that Apple was a jealous
“nobody,” while Apple’s fans mocked
them as ignoramuses.)
Apple told me that she didn’t listen
to any modern music. She chalked this
up to a fear of outside influences, but
she had a tetchiness about younger song-
writers, too. She had always possessed
aspects of Emily Dickinson, in the po-
et’s “I’m Nobody” mode: pridefulness
in retreat. Apple sometimes fantasized
about pulling a Garbo: she’d release one
final album, then disappear. But she also
had something that resembled a repe-
tition compulsion—she wanted to take
all the risks of her early years, but this
time have them work out right.W
hen I returned to Venice Beach,
in September, the mood was
different. Anxiety suffused the house.
In July, Apple had been worried about
returning to public view, but she was
also often playful and energized, tweak-
ing mixes. Now the thought of what
she’d recorded brought on paralyzing
waves of dread.
To distract herself, she’d turned to other
projects. She accepted a request from
Sarah Treem, the co-creator of the Show-
time series “The Affair,” to cover the Wa-
terboys song “The Whole of the Moon”
for the show’s finale. (Apple had also
written the show’s potent theme song—
the keening “Container.”) Apple agreed
to write a jokey song for the Fox cartoon