Back in January, legendary alt-pop songwriter Fiona Apple revealed her first album in eight years was nearing completion. Earlier this month, she announced it was complete.
Now, in a rare new interview with The New Yorker‘s Emily Nussbaum, Apple has discussed – among other things – upcoming fifth studio album Fetch the Bolt Cutters, the follow-up to Apple’s 2012 record The Idler Wheel…
It’s an in-depth and wide-ranging interview, which sees Apple outline the process of the “percussion-heavy” album. Apple began recording the album – its title a reference to a scene in the Gillian Anderson-starring British crime series The Fall – back in 2015. It contains 13 songs, and was composed and recorded by Apple largely at her home studio, with her handling all production.
In the piece, Apple talks about being inspired to make the album through a fascination with the potential of using a band “as an organism instead of an assemblage—something natural.” Her band on the record included drummer Amy Aileen Wood, bassist Sebastian Steinberg and guitarist David Garza.
Apple expresses experiencing apprehension towards the songs due to their subject matter and “raw sounds” or drums, chants and bells, along with wariness around facing public scrutiny. Towards the end of the piece, however, it describes Apple’s “renewed bravado” after reconnecting with the band she worked with on the album to listen to final mixes. Apple goes on to get a tattoo of a bolt cutter running down her forearm.
Apple also reflects on her earlier work, describing 1999 album When the Pawn… as “just a great album,” and expresses dislike of 2005 Extraordinary Machine track ‘Please Please Please’.
Among many other topics, the interview also sees Apple go into her tumultuous relationship with Paul Thomas Anderson, describing an incident in which Anderson threw a chair across the room after the 1998 Academy Awards.
She also describes “one excruciating night” with Anderson and Quentin Tarantino which saw her quit cocaine. “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.”
The interview doesn’t reveal a release date for Fetch the Bolt Cutters – but hopefully we can expect it sometime this year, and sometime soon. God knows it’d be a welcome reprieve from the universe right now.
Read the whole, great interview over at The New Yorker here.
