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Fiona Apple FaceTimes me on a recent Friday afternoon from a bright-pink futon inside her Venice Beach home, her hair in a long braid, wearing giant headphones, a cozy green sweatshirt, and no makeup. The first thing she says is that she's nervous. "I'm like, Oh, shit," she says, laughing.
Her nerves are understandable. Apple, 42, is on the verge of releasing her first album in eight years, which she insisted on pushing up to an April 17 release in the wake of, well, everything (her record label initially wanted to wait until October). She's spent most of the past decade hanging out at home with her pit-bull–boxer mix, Mercy, and her friend Zelda Hallman; she's apprehensive about returning to a sort of public life that's burned her in the past. And according to Apple, her fifth album, is her most personal yet, filled with vulnerable confessions stretching back as far as her middle-school years. With it, she's forced herself out of her hiding places in every sense.
FTBC also marks something of a tonal shift for Apple: The album is less melancholy than her previous works — it's funny, angry, and at times triumphant. It's full of wordplay and singular sonic experiments: dogs barking, supermodels meowing, chanting, bells. She sees it as an artistic breakthrough. "Making this album has really helped me get through stuff, and I don't know if I can say that about my other albums," says Apple, who recorded and co-produced all 13 songs inside her home, with band members Amy Aileen Wood, Sebastian Steinberg, and Davíd Garza, often using GarageBand and her iPhone. It's also her first album where she had final say on all production decisions.
Apple's nerves dissolve as we fall into a long, digressive conversation — since last fall — followed by a series of winding, poetic text messages (which appear in footnotes below). Mercy lumbers in and out of the frame, popping into Apple's lap and licking her face as she speaks about everything from healing her relationships with women to getting sober, finally becoming angry with the man who raped her at age 12, and whether she's found peace.
When did you officially start working on Fetch the Bolt Cutters?
So little happens with me that's ever official. I guess we started — Oh, hi, Mercy. [Apple's dog walks into the frame and sits on her.]
Are you in your recording room?
The whole house is the recording room. We recorded it in the living room, but this is the room I did most of my vocals in and most of the stuff that I did by myself, except for a bunch of percussion tracks. [To Mercy] You can sit here, baby. You want to sit here? You just have to give me a place to be.
We started first trying to be a band and to have me build my confidence up as a musician, because it was really low a few years ago. It's funny I've never been able to jam with people. I wish there was a better word for jamming. I've always been too shy to try, which is not a good way to be. If you grow up and you're praised a lot for being special, rather than for making an effort, you end up later on in life being afraid. I would get into situations — and I have to watch myself still — where I don't even want to try because if I don't end up being special, then I don't value my own effort as much as I should.
I put together the band in February of 2015 so that we could just jam, so I could learn how to feel as free as I do singing when I'm playing stuff. I don't think I ever got there, but it was good enough for me to start recording with the band. Some of the songs I started writing years ago, [like] "Rack of His." I did a couple of versions. I almost put it on a couple of albums, but it was a completely different song. I guess we officially started the album when we went to Sonic Ranch in Texas in July of 2015, but it was a false start.
