Picture me in middle-school, knowing so little about life, let alone love, madness, life, or the madness in love and life. Again, picture this; me in my adolescence listening to Fiona Apple and knowing almost nothing about the lyrical content, but still feeling it. I felt the frustration, the longing, the edge; I felt the encompassing confusion that Fiona Apple and Jon Brion embodied perfectly. “I’m gonna fuck it up again, gonna do another detour…” Fiona Apple sings on “A Mistake.” It doesn’t surprise me in retrospect that her sheer defiance would appeal to a teenage rebel with no cause like me. The most impressive thing about the album is that through my maturity and my learning about love and life, When the Pawn… still applies.

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