28 THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020
McAfee, a former dancer and actress,
remains in New York, in the Morning-
side Heights apartment building where
Apple grew up.
Amber, a cabaret singer who records
under the name Maude Maggart, had
brought along her thirteen-month-old
baby, Winifred, who scooched across
the floor, playing under the piano. Apple
was there when Winifred was born, and,
as we talked about the bizarreness of
childbirth, Apple told me a joke about
a lady who got pregnant with twins.
Whenever people asked the lady if she
wanted boys or girls, she said, “I don’t
care, I just want my children to be po-
lite!” Nine months passed, but she didn’t
go into labor. A year went by—still noth-
ing. “Eight, nine, twenty years!” Apple
said, her eyebrows doing a jig. “Twenty-
five years—and finally they’re, like, ‘We
have to figure out what’s going on in
there.’” When doctors peeked inside,
they found “two middle-aged men going,
‘After youuuu!’ ‘No, after youuuu!’”
Amber was there to record one line:
a bit of harmony on “Newspaper,” one
of thirteen new songs on the album.
Apple, who wore a light-blue oxford
shirt and loose beige pants, her hair in
a low bun, stood by the piano, coaching
Amber, who sat down in a wicker rock-
ing chair, pulling Winifred onto her lap.
“It’s a shame, because you and I didn’t
get a witness!” Apple crooned, placing
the notes in the air with her palm. Then
the sisters sang, in harmony, “We’re the
only ones who know!” The “we’re” came
out as a jaunty warble, adding ironic sub-
text to the song, which was about two
women connected by their histories with
an abusive man. Apple, with her singu-
lar smoky contralto, modelled the com-
plex emotions of the line for Amber,
warming her up to record.
“Does that work?” Apple asked Win-
ifred, who gazed up from her mother’s
lap. Abruptly, Apple bent her knees,
poked her elbows back like wings, and
swung her hips, peekabooing toward
Winifred. The baby laughed. It was si-
multaneously a rehearsal and a playdate.
“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is a refer-
ence to a scene in “The Fall,” the Brit-
ish police procedural starring Gillian
Anderson as a sex-crimes investigator;
Anderson’s character calls out the phrase
after finding a locked door to a room
where a girl has been tortured. Like all
of Apple’s projects, this one was taking
a long while to emerge, arriving through
a slow-drip process of creative self-in-
terrogation that has produced, over a
quarter century, a narrow but deep song-
book. Her albums are both profoundly
personal—tracing her heartaches, her
showdowns with her own fragility, and
her fierce, phoenix-like recoveries—and
musically audacious, growing wilder and
stranger with each round. As her 2005
song “Extraordinary Machine” suggests,
whereas other artists might move fast,
grasping for fresh influences and achiev-
ing superficial novelty, Apple prides her-
self on a stickier originality, one that
springs from an internal tick-tock: “I
still only travel by foot, and by foot it’s
a slow climb/But I’m good at being
uncomfortable, so I can’t stop changing
all the time.”
The new album, she said, was close
to being finished, but, as with the twins
from the joke, the due date kept getting
pushed back. She was at once excited
about these songs—composed and re-
corded at home, with all production de-
cisions under her control—and appre-
hensive about some of their subject
matter, as well as their raw sound (drums,
chants, bells). She was also wary of fac-
ing public scrutiny again. Fame has long
been a jarring experience for Apple, who
has dealt since childhood with obses-
sive-compulsive disorder, depression,
and anxiety.
After a while, she and Amber went
into a small room—Apple’s former bed-
room, where, for years, she had slept on
a futon with Janet. After the dog died,
she’d found herself unable to fall asleep
there, and had turned the room into a
recording studio, although it looked
nothing like one: it was cluttered, with
one small window and no sound-
proofing. There was a beat-up wooden
desk and a computer on which Apple
recorded tracks, using GarageBand.
There was a mike stand and a Day of
the Dead painting of a smiling female
skeleton holding a skeleton dog. Every
surface, from the shelves to the floor,
was covered in a mulch of battered per-
cussion instruments: bells, wooden
blocks, drums, metal squares.
The sisters recorded the lyric over
and over, with Apple at the computer
and Amber standing, Winifred on her
hip. During one take, Amber pulled theneck of her turquoise leotard down and
began nursing her daughter. Apple
looked up from GarageBand, caught
her sister’s eye, and smiled. “It’s hap-
pening—it’s happening,” she said.W
hen you tell people that you are
planning to meet with Fiona
Apple, they almost inevitably ask if she’s
O.K. What “O.K.” means isn’t neces-
sarily obvious, however. Maybe it means
healthy, or happy. Maybe it means cre-
ating the volcanic and tender songs that
she’s been writing since she was a child—
or maybe it doesn’t, if making music
isn’t what makes her happy. Maybe it
means being unhappy, but in a way that
is still fulfilling, still meaningful. That’s
the conundrum when someone’s art-
istry is tied so fully to her vulnerability,
and to the act of dwelling in and stir-
ring up her most painful emotions, as
a sort of destabilizing muse.
In the nineties, Apple’s emergence
felt near-mythical. Fiona Apple McAfee-
Maggart, the musically precocious, emo-
tionally fragile descendant of a line of
entertainers, was a classically trained pi-
anist who began composing at seven.
One night, at the age of sixteen, she was
in her apartment, staring down at Riv-
erside Park, when she thought she heard
a voice telling her to record songs drawn
from her notebooks, which were full of
heartbreak and sexual trauma. She flew
to L.A., where her father was living,
and with his help recorded three songs;
they made seventy-eight demo tapes,
and he told her to prepare to hustle. Yet
the first tape she shared was enough:
a friend passed a copy to the music
publicist she babysat for, who gave it
to Andrew Slater, a prominent record
producer and manager. Slater, then
thirty-seven, hired a band, booked a stu-
dio in L.A., and produced her début
album, “Tidal.” It featured such sophis-
ticated ballads as “Shadowboxer,” as well
as the hit “Criminal,” which irresistibly
combined a hip-hop beat, rattling piano,
and sinuous flute; she’d written it in
forty-five minutes, during a lunch break
at the studio. The album sold 2.7 mil-
lion copies.
Slater also oversaw a marketing
campaign that presented his new art-
ist as a sulky siren, transforming her
into a global star and a media target.
Diane McAfee remembers that time as