Analytical atypical fangirl on a mission

I’ve oft craved the opportunity to analyze or critique or praise wildly and with abandon those bits and pieces of art and brilliance that help sustain me, especially over the course of the last year.

As has pretty much every human, mask enthusiast and Covid denier alike, I’ve learned some shit about myself since lockdown began, not all of it pretty and some of it downright fucked up.

But one huge blessing has been my accessing a different level of consciousness when it comes to my own creativity and my identification with that of others.

So tonight’s talk, if you will, is all about a little lady by the name of Fiona Apple.

Fiona Apple is the single artist who ever got to share my complete adulation with Kate Bush. Each of them sings from a different part of me, when I listen. It’s almost as if they are each one of my multiples, if I were a Sybil-like character, instead of merely, um, eccentric, (to have a little compassion for my strange self.)

So I write in real time, out of my profound gratitude for the opportunity to see myself in places I look for brilliance, and Fiona Apple, Kate Bush, Leonard Cohen, Teresa Tudury, and maybe three or four other artists have ever hit me in a place that near to who I am, and held a mirror up for me to gaze into.

Listening now to Not About Love, and the roll of the piano, like troubled waters under a small craft carrying scared children.

The song teeters between anger and despair and indignation, as if its writer is offended by her own tender feelings for that stupid ape.

Then she loses her mind in a Paganini-like fervor, drawing her bow across her powerful vocals and howling into her own heart as she insists it’s not about love, even as she bemoans the obvious hole left in her heart by the absence of that stupid ape.

Now I’m listening to Waltz, aka Better Than Fine, and all I see is a beautifully dressed couple gliding gracefully about a hardwood dance floor.

Fiona doesn’t believe in the wasting of time, and gave us this gorgeous piece of economical music, written in 3/4 time, to save a beat per measure.

The song contains elements of weddings, Broadway shows, ballets, and the irony of self consciousness.

Extraordinary Machine is a soft shoe, or even an exaggerated tiptoe in Fosse-like costume, with the rolling wrists and shoulders thrown in for good measure. There is always an element of the theatrical in her music, being from a Broadway family with a sister who is a cabaret singer in New York and Los Angeles.

As a very young person I was fortuitously introduced to another young female musical genius, the ethereal and odd Kate Bush, a creative genius at least on a par with David Bowie. KateHits me in my inner 12 year old, the age I was when I was first bowled over by her.

For me, Fiona’s music is much more practical, like a manual for life written in code, discernible a little at a time, each piece of wisdom grokked on its own and in proportion to my growth. Like, wisdom I’ve earned by living.

I think if I have to choose the one song of hers that I relate to the most, it would have to be WINDOW.

Window is so visual a song, somehow viewed through a sparkling lens, regardless of how muddy it is in the song.

Her self awareness and knowledge of her talents and shortcomings and vision are clearer in this song than any other, at least for me. There’s even her barreling into each chorus, confessing to breaking the window after the music clearly kicks the shit out of it. I’ve never wished for my youthful energy so much as I do when I hear it so I can get up and move to it. It tells the truth on every level to the point of damning the lessons of meta fiction and demanding the absolute truth, from herself and everyone around her.

There has never before been such an artist to be reckoned with as this one.