In March 2000, Fiona Apple stormed off stage midconcert in New York after complaining about the venue’s sound and berating music critics she spied recording her meltdown in their notebooks.
For many, the episode confirmed Apple’s rep as a petulant and unstable artist, an image reinforced by her pouty demeanor, moody lyrics and profane outburst at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards.
Apple, touring with a new album, views the infamous New York show as the best thing that happened to her performing career.
“You realize that things can go that bad and (despite that,) you’re still fine, you can still go on. That helped calm me down a lot,” she said by phone from her home in Venice, Calif.
“Once you’ve faced failure and humiliation and you’ve stared it down and you’re fine, then you’re not so afraid of it anymore,” she said. “It loosens you up to really have more fun and not be so self-conscious and not be so concentrated on perfection all the time, which I think makes for better shows.”
Apple is back on the road again, and concertgoers can judge for themselves whether she’s grown up as a performer.
“I feel like since the last time I was on the road, I’ve become a true adult,” she said. “In the past, it always felt a little bit odd and uncomfortable to me to be the so-called captain of the ship, because I felt like a little girl in the company of men.”
Indeed, Apple was only 19 when her debut album, “Tidal,” sold 3 million copies and landed her wide-eyed beauty on magazine covers everywhere. Her rich, husky voice, slithering over percussive piano grooves on hits like “Criminal” and “Shadowboxer,” was startling coming from such a young waif.
The singer-songwriter then spent almost five years out of the public eye.
“It does really disturb me to be a public figure sometimes, just because I’m very insecure,” she said. “But sometimes I have days where I don’t feel insecure at all, and I feel very good, and it’s fun to be in the spotlight a little. And those days are more often than they used to be.”
“Extraordinary Machine,” Apple’s latest record and first in six years, arrived in stores last fall after a well-publicized delay. Apple recorded an album’s worth of tracks with producer Jon Brion in 2002 and 2003, but was unhappy with the results. Someone leaked the songs to the Internet, and rumors began swirling that Sony, Apple’s label, was refusing to release the record. Fans mounted a “Free Fiona” campaign in protest.
Apple has mixed feelings about the whole saga, comparing it to the feeling you get when your house is burgled.
She eventually returned to the recording studio with producer Mike Elizondo and reworked all but two of the “Extraordinary Machine” songs.
The resulting album sounds sunnier and more self-affirming than anything Apple has done.
“I wasn’t making an effort to show anybody that I was feeling better. I was just trying to be honest,” said Apple, adding that she writes songs most often when she’s upset. “When I’m happy, I don’t want to go sit down and write a song. But I think all you need (to write a good song) is to be overwhelmed by something, any kind of emotion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a tragedy. It can be something good.”
When her tour ends, Apple hopes to hire a tutor or take some classes to further the education she feels she missed by choosing a music career over college. In the meantime, she is trying to reconcile singing the darker songs from “Tidal” with her new, happier stage persona.
“I can apply (the song) to whatever’s going on in my life now … and twist it around to make it mean something so that I’m not just going through the motions up there,” she said. “But it’s exhausting, because in order to really feel the song it kind of requires me to go to these angry places. I’m astonished at my seemingly endless well of rage.”
And with that, Apple, well aware of her “tortured artist” image, bursts out laughing.
