It is a rare gift when you engage with a piece of art that has such a precise emotional depth contained within that it so deeply resonates with your own personal experience. The last time I can remember this happening was on the song 'Nobody' sung by Mitski on her album, Be The Cowboy, which I first listened to on my friend Fen's bed, maybe around midnight, coming off a high. I listened to it on repeat all of the next few weeks, replaying it for most of my 5 hour flight from Vancouver to Montreal days later, letting the disco beat seep into my blood stream and feeling the warmth of connection to her loneliness conveyed over an almost flippantly groove. It was not until returning back to school a month later, walking up the wooden stairs to the Max Bell, singing the song into the cold air where I finally heard the line 'I've been big and small/and big and small/and still nobody wants me'. Whatever Mitski's intent behind these lyrics (which I later found out was a reference to her relationship with her body & her weight), I found in those lyrics affirmation and catharsis. I related it not to weight but to the amplitudes of my personality: outgoing, flamboyant or guarded, shut-off. and the personal balance I felt I needed to strike when it came to the two sides, in order to get people to like me. It has been a year and a half since this connection occurred, and listening to Fiona Apple's newest album - Fetch the Bolt Cutters, I feel it again.
This album is alive, in ways unlike anything else I've really heard. The percussive beats that run through it, that command your attention and ear from the minute the opening notes sound, they breathe and signal that this album is like a beast that will not stop until it is finished saying what it needs to say, and this beast - it rattles and stamps, crazed. Listening to this album makes me feel connected to the physical space around me. While Apple bangs on the surfaces of her house, so do I. When she wails, so do I. She has managed to compose these bizarre, sonically disparate, but completely digestible tracks. They're so complex and complicated that they require listen after listen just to grasp the basics, and each listen bears new gifts - whether in a previously misunderstood lyric which are so precisely written that once grasped can be mined for meaning and interpretation. I am in awe of her.
The album has songs and themes that I can't immediately relate to - there are songs about the power of women told to hate each other not doing that exactly. There are songs about the singer's rape, about her abusive ex-partners. The strength of these songs, and why I like them, are not so personal, but just simply that when I listen to them I feel like I'm listening to something completely new, and my ear loves it. She's crafted these rhythms and melodies and hooks and choruses and verses that are so mind boggling that they actually get stuck inside your head.
The album just has unreal and unbelievable moment after moment. I love the introduction to "I Want You To Love Me' - the segue from percussive line into piano is sublime. Her avant-garde tilt of experimentalism at the end, the lyrics which punch one at a time, taking swings. "Next year/it'll be clear/this was only leading me to that" - perfectly expressing the pained irritation of hindsight. Of knowing you'll be okay but not feeling okay in the moment. It's just, completely spectacular.
I've been listening to this album on repeat. I hope to be able to write about it more sensitively and with more clarity soon. I'm no music reviewer so as I write this I need to remind myself not to go overboard with the pressure on myself. I can write however I like. It doesn't matter.
In fact I should take my cue from Fiona Apple. She clearly doesn't give a fuck, and she marches to the beat of her own drum (or metal butterfly that she picked up while wandering). She does whatever she wants, without any second thought for what anyone else might care about. And I think that's amazing.
Finally - the bolt cutters. She's explained that the album is sort of a call to arms - for all of us to take the bolt cutters and set them onto the gnarled barbs and wires that surround us, and for me I picture them surrounding my heart. She says fuck what society tells you to do, fuck what you've internalised from other people, fuck whatever isn't making you happy, fuck that all. She says take the bolt cutters to that shit, really just completely get rid of them, and just be happy. And honestly, how can you not do exactly as she says?
so guys - fetch the fucking bolt cutters. That's what I'll be doing.
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