THENEWYORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 37
technique called “brain balancing.” Ar
ticles about neurological anomalies
fascinated her. The first day we met,
Apple spread printouts of brain scans
on the floor of her studio, pointing
to blue and pink shapes. She was seek
ing patterns, just as she often did on
Tumblr, reposting images, doing rabbit
hole searches that she knew were a form
of magical thinking.
Apple doesn’t consider herself an al
coholic, but for years she drank vodka
alone, every night, until she passed out.
When she’d walk by the freezer, she’d
reach for a sip; for her, the first step to
ward sobriety was simply being con
scious of that impulse. She had quit co
caine years earlier, after spending “one
excruciating night” at Quentin Taranti
no’s house, listening to him and Ander
son brag. “Every addict should just get
locked in a private movie theatre with
Q.T. and P.T.A. on coke, and they’ll
never want to do it again,” she joked.
She loved getting loose on wine, but not
the regret that followed. Her father has
been sober for decades, but when Apple
was a little kid he was a turbulent alco
holic. He hit bottom when he had a vi
olent confrontation with a Manhattan
cabdriver; Apple was only four, but she
remembers his bloody face, the nurse at
the hospital. When I visited Apple’s
mother at her Manhattan apartment,
she showed me a photo album with pic
tures of Apple as a child. One image was
captioned “Fiona had too much wine—
not feeling good,” with a scribbled sad
face. Apple, at two, had wandered around
an adult party, drinking the dregs.
For decades, Apple has taken pre
scription psychopharmaceuticals. She
told me that she’d been given a diag
nosis of “complex developmental post
traumatic stress disorder.” (It was such
a satisfyingly multisyllabic phrase that
she preferred to sing it, transforming it
into a ditty.) In December, she began
having mood swings, with symptoms
bad enough that she was told to get an
MRI, to rule out a pituitary tumor. In
the end, Apple said, she had to wean
herself off an antipsychotic that she had
been prescribed for her night terrors; the
dosage, she said, had been way too high.
As she recovered, she felt troubled, some
times, by a sense of flatness: if she couldn’t
feel the emotion in the songs, she said,
she wouldn’t be able to tell what worked.
Earlier that fall, she had given an in
terview to the Web site Vulture, in which
she was brassy and perceptive. People re
sponded enthusiastically—many young
women saw in Apple a gutsy iconoclast
who’d shrugged off the world’s demands.
She won praise, too, for having donated
a year’s worth of profits from “Crimi
nal”—which J. Lo dances to in the re
cent movie “Hustlers”—to immigrant
criminaldefense cases. But the positive
response also threw her, she realized.
“Even the best circumstances of being
in public may be too much,” she told me.B
y January, the situation was better.
Apple was no longer having night
mares, although she was still worried,
at times, by her moods. One layer of
selfprotection had been removed when
she stopped using alcohol, she said; an
other was lost with the reduction in
medication. And, although she was en
thusiastic about some new mixes, she
felt apprehensive. She could listen to
the tracks, but only through headphones.
So we talked about the subject that
made her feel best: the dog rescues she
was funding. She paid her brother Bran
to pick up the dogs across the country,
then drive them to L.A., for placement
in foster homes. She and Hallman fol
lowed along through videos that Bran
sent them. The dogs had been through
terrible experiences: one was raped by
humans; another was beaten with a
shovel. Apple felt that she should not
flinch from these details. Rebecca Corry,
of Stand Up for Pits, had given her ad
vice for coping: “You have to celebrate
small victories and remember their faces
and move on to the next one.”
Then, one day, Apple’s band came to
her house to listen to the latest mixes.
The next afternoon, her face was glow
ing again. She had wondered if the meet
ing would be awkward—if the band
might disagree on what edits to make.
Instead, she and Amy Aileen Wood kept
glancing at each other, ecstatic, as they
had all the same responses. At last, Apple
could listen to the album on speakers.
Afterward, I texted Wood. “Dare I
say it was magical?!” Wood wrote. “Ev
erything is sounding so damn good!”
Steinberg told me that the notes were
simple: “Get out of the way of the music”
and let Apple’s voice dominate. Apple
knew what she wanted, he said. He described his job as helping her to recog
nize “that she was her own Svengali.”
It reminded me of a story that Bran
had told me, about working in construc
tion. One day, when he was twentyeight,
he strolled out onto a beam suspended
thirtyfive feet in the air—a task that
he’d done many times. Suddenly, he was
frozen, terrified of falling. Yet all he had
to do was touch something—any ob
ject at all—to break the spell. “Because
you’re grounded, you can just touch a
leaf on a tree and walk,” he said.
Seeing her band again had grounded
Apple. She felt a renewed bravado. She’d
made plans to rerelease “When the
Pawn ...” on vinyl, but with the origi
nal artwork, by Paul Thomas Anderson,
swapped out. “That’s just a great album,”
she told me. Looking back on her cat
alogue, she thought that her one weak
song might be “Please Please Please,”
on “Extraordinary Machine,” which she
wrote only because the record company
had demanded another track: “Please,
please, please, no more melodies.”
In the next few weeks, she sent up
dates: she was considering potential
video directors; she was brainstorming
ideas for album art, like a sketch of Har
vey Weinstein with his walker. She’d
even gone out to see King Princess per
form. One night, after petting Janet’s
skull and talking to her, Apple went into
her old bedroom: she was able to sleep
on the futon again, with Mercy. She’d
also got a new tattoo, of a black bolt
cutter, running down her right forearm.
On the day that Jonathan Ames came
over, Apple had pondered the exact na
ture of her work. Maybe, she suggested,
she was like any other artist whose body
is an instrument—a ballerina who wears
her feet out or a sculptor who strains his
back. Maybe she, too, wore herself out.
Maybe that’s why she had to take time
to heal in between projects. In “On I
Go,” the first song she’d written for
“Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” she chanted
about trying to lead a life guided by inner,
rather than outer, impulses: “On I go,
not toward or away/Up until now it was
day, next day/Up until now in a rush to
prove/But now I only move to move.”
In the middle of the track, she screwed
up the beat for a second and said, “Ah,
fuck, shit.” It was a moment almost any
one making a final edit would smooth
out. She left it in.