THENEWYORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 31
drums,” into a “percussion orchestra,”
which she used to make songs. She
yowled the vocals over and over, stretch-
ing her voice into fresh shapes; like a
Dogme 95 filmmaker, she rejected any
digital smoothing. “She’s not afraid to
let her voice be in the room and of the
room,” Garza said. “Modern recording
erases that.”
The resulting songs are so percus-
sion-heavy that they’re almost martial.
Passages loop and repeat, and there are
out-of-the-blue tempo changes. Stein-
berg described the new numbers as closer
to “Hot Knife,” an “Idler Wheel” track
that pairs Andrews Sisters-style har-
monies with stark timpani beats, than
to her early songs, which were intri-
cately orchestrated. “It’s very raw and
unslick,” he said, of the new work, be-
cause her “agenda has gotten wilder and
a lot less concerned with what the out-
side world thinks—she’s not seventeen,
she’s forty, and she’s got no reason not
to do exactly what she wants.”
Apple had been writing songs in the
same notebooks for years, scribbling new
lyrics alongside older ones. At one point,
as we sat on the floor near the piano, she
grabbed a stack of them, hunting for
some lines she’d written when she was
fifteen: “Evil is a relay sport/When the
one who’s burned turns to pass the torch.”
“My handwriting is so different,” she
marvelled, flipping pages. She found a
diary entry from 1997: “I’m insecure about
the guys in my band. I want to spend
more time with them! But it seems im-
possible to ever go out and have fun.”
Apple laughed out loud, amazed. “I can’t
even recognize this person,” she said. “‘I
want to go out and have fun!’”
“Here’s the bridge to ‘Fast as You
Can,’” she said, referring to a song from
“When the Pawn ... .” Then she an-
nounced, “Oh, here it is—‘Evil is a relay
sport.’” She continued reading: “It
breathes in the past and then—” She
shot me a knowing glance. “Lots of my
writing from then is just, like, I don’t
know how to say it: a young person try-
ing to be a writer.” Written in the mar-
gin was the word “Help.”
Whenever I asked Apple how she
created melodies, she apologized for
lacking the language to describe her pro-
cess (often with an anxious detour about
not being as good a drummer as Wood).
She said that her focus on rhythm had
some connections to the O.C.D. rituals
she’d developed as a child, like crunch-
ing leaves and counting breaths, or roller-
skating around her dining-room table
eighty-eight times—the number of keys
on a piano—while singing Bob Dylan’s
“Like a Rolling Stone.”
But Apple brightened whenever she
talked about writing lyrics, speaking
confidently about assonance and seren-
dipity, about the joy of having the words
“glide down the back of my throat”—
as she put it, stroking her neck—when
she got them exactly right. She collects
words on index cards: “Angel,” “Excel,”
“Intel,” “Gel.” She writes the alphabet
above her drafts, searching, with puzzle-
solver focus, for puns, rhymes, and ac-
cidental insights.
The new songs were full of spiky, lay-
ered wordplay. In “Rack of His,” Apple
sings, like a sideshow barker, “Check
out that rack of his!/Look at that row
of guitar necks/Lined up like eager fil-
lies/Outstretched like legs of Rock-
ettes.” In the darkly funny “Kick Me
Under the Table,” she tells a man at a
fancy party, “I would beg to disagree/But
begging disagrees with me.” As frank
as her lyrics can be, they are not easily
decoded as pure biography. She said, of
“Rack of His,” “I started writing this
song years ago about one relationship,
and then, when I finished it, it was about
a different relationship.”
When I described the clever “La-
dies”—the music of which she co-wrote
with Steinberg—as having a vaudeville
vibe, Apple flinched. She found the no-
tion corny. “It’s just, like, something I’ve
got in my blood that I’m gonna need
to get rid of,” she said. Other songs felt
close to hip-hop, with her voice used
more for force and flow than for mel-
ody, and as a vehicle for braggadocio
and insults. There was a pungency in
Apple’s torch-and-honey voice emit-
ting growls, shrieks, and hoots.
Some of the new material was strik-
ingly angry. The cathartic “For Her”
builds to Apple hollering, “Good
mornin’! Good mornin’/You raped me
in the same bed your daughter was
born in.” The song had grown out of a
Apple, in 1996. The press treated her as a bruised prodigy to be ogled and pitied.
MARK BAKER / GETTY
