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.

Every time I dust off the CD and put it in for another spin, the album is just as relevant as it ever was if not more so, now that my heart has been through a few games of kickball and my mind has experiences its share of Ping-Pong tournaments.. Fiona Apple speaks my disappointment with men on “Paper Bag” so playfully and exquisite that instead of cried tears, you have confident sighs of relief that someone actually gets it. I remember returning home from school while “Fast As You Can” played on my MP3 player (yes, my middle-class family was not investing in a iPOD, at the time) and I sonically being fascinated with the changes of melodies and poetically inspired by Fiona Apple’s brilliance. “Tired of whys choking on whys, just need a little because…” Fiona Apple is the type of poet that shines lights on concerns and frustrations that you didn’t even know you possessed. Jon Brion painted the whole album like the modern musical answer to a Francis Bacon painting.

 

When The Pawn… is personal, haunting, scary, and romantically demented. Fiona Apple howls on “The Way Things Are” and “I Know” that inspire thoughts of Amy Winehouse or Adele of how private and raw the emotions felt. Fiona Apple garnered plenty of attention for her debut album, “Tidal”, and her latest album, Extraordinary Machine. However, When the Pawn… is the lyrical and musical tour de force that all fans wish their favorite artists would achieve at their professional peak and person lowest. Think Chaka Khan and Rufus’ “Camouflage” or Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope set to the sensibilities of Norah Jones with the spunk of Karen-O. Fiona Apple was obviously at her lowest during the recording of this album, and consequently at her highest when it came to delivery heart-stabbing tunes that bled into one another likes a magic marker on thin white sheets of paper. “Instead, I’m sitting here. Singing again, singing again, singing again!” Yes, Fiona, you’re singing again, but not just your own personal woes, but ones of a whole tragically heart-broken generation and now to one fiend of a fan.

Related Posts: