Fiona Apple started writing in order to more effectively argue with her parents. As a kid who’d been identified as troubled and sent to therapy, she struggled to make authority figures see her side of conflicts. “So I’d go back into my room and I would write a letter and an hour later, I’d come out and read it—‘This is how I feel’—and I’d go back into my room,” Apple recalled in a 1999 Washington Post interview. “I would love the way that it felt to have your side of an argument right here in front of you. If I wrote a letter, I didn’t even need to win an argument.”
In this, as in so much else, she was precocious. Great art has been motivated by that same impulse to correct the record—to impress a divergent worldview on those who’d prefer to ignore it, whether that audience numbers two or, in the case of Apple’s first album, 1996’s Tidal, three million. That remarkable debut contained rejoinders to a fickle lover, a rapist, and anyone foolish enough to write off Apple because she happened to be young or small or female. As a hip-hop fan, Apple understood the power of a boast. In its bluntness, Tidal also functioned as a preemptive act of self-defense from a person already accustomed to being misunderstood.
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A legion of new fans, many of them girls younger than Apple (who was 18 at the time of the album’s release), understood her messages of individualism and resilience instinctually. But her candor didn’t exactly prevent the press or the public from judging her harshly; though her notorious “this world is bullshit” speech at the 1997 VMAs constituted a cannier analysis of celebrity culture than most people in the entertainment industry wanted to admit, its messiness suggested that she was still a more eloquent writer than speaker. By the time she started composing her second album, Apple had a reputation—as a bitch, a brat, a heroin-chic waif and possible anorexic, a performer who, according to The New York Times, “plays a Lolita-ish suburban party girl” on TV but comes on more like a “shrinking violet” in concert. It was hers to shake off, or at least to reshape on her own terms.
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