26 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 23, 2020
F
iona Apple was wrestling with
her dog, Mercy, the way a person
might thrash, happily, in rough
waves. Apple tugged on a purple toy as
Mercy, a pit-bull-boxer mix, gripped it
in her jaws, spinning Apple in circles.
Worn out, they flopped onto two day-
beds in the living room, in front of a
TV that was always on. The first day
that I visited, last July, it was set to
MSNBC, which was airing a story about
Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book.
These days, the singer-songwriter,
who is forty-two, rarely leaves her tran-
quil house, in Venice Beach, other than
to take early-morning walks on the
beach with Mercy. Five years ago, Apple
stopped going to Largo, the Los Angeles
venue where, since the late nineties, she’d
regularly performed her thorny, emotion-
ally revelatory songs. (Her song “Largo”
still plays on the club’s Web site.) She’d
cancelled her most recent tour, in 2012,
when Janet, a pit bull she had adopted
when she was twenty-two, was dying.
Still, a lot can go on without leaving
home. Apple’s new album, whose com-
pletion she’d been inching toward for
years, was a tricky topic, and so, during
the week that I visited, we cycled in and
out of other subjects, among them her
decision, a year earlier, to stop drinking;
estrangements from old friends; and her
memories of growing up, in Manhat-
tan, as the youngest child in the “second
family” of a married Broadway actor.
Near the front door of Apple’s house
stood a chalkboard on wheels, which
was scrawled with the title of the up-
coming album: “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.”
One afternoon, Apple’s older sister,
Amber, arrived to record vocal harmo-
nies. In the living room, there was an
upright piano, its top piled with keep-
sakes, including a stuffed toucan knit-
ted by Apple’s mother and a photograph
of Martha Graham doing a backbend.
Apple’s friend Zelda Hallman, who had
not long ago become her housemate,
was in the sunny yellow kitchen, cook-
ing tilapia for Mercy and for Hallman’s
Bernese mountain dog, Maddie. In the
back yard, there was a guesthouse, where
Apple’s half brother, Bran Maggart, a
carpenter, lived. (For years, he’d worked
as a driver for Apple, who never got a
license, and helped manage her tours.)
Apple’s father, Brandon Maggart, also
lives in Venice Beach; her mother, Diane
PROFILES
SKIN IN THE GAME
Fiona Apple’s radical sensitivity.
BY EMILY NUSSBAUM
Apple’s new album, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” like all her others, arrived through a slow-dr
