The second track on Fiona Apple’s debut album, released in 1996 when she was 18 years old, is a ballad about trauma. She describes the paralysis of depression: how the hurt stalks below the surface; how emotions rage and contort out of view. “And there’s too much going on/But it’s calm under the waves/In the blue of my oblivion,” she sings, as if facing a brewing wind, her voice a beacon of dignity, soul, and resolve. And then she digs deeper.
Each word, like rocks tumbling into jewels, falls into the next. The internal rhymes hang onto one another and lift you up. No surprise, then, that spirals of poetry and jazz formed Fiona. She began on piano as an 8-year-old in Manhattan with a collection of standards called The Real Book (Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday were favorites). She was sent to psychiatrists, which she resented; once, staring at ink-blots, she made out the shape of a beetle and so proclaimed that she saw John Lennon’s face. Fiona has referred to Lennon as “God” and Maya Angelou as her “mother.” She slept with a compilation of Angelou’s writings under her pillow. “She had brought me through some tough times and shown me a light,” Fiona once said of Angelou, who she thanks in the liner notes of Tidal’s vinyl reissue “for everything you’ve ever written.”
In Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, first published in 1969, she describes her experience, at 8 years old, of being raped in her mother’s St. Louis home. After, she grows quiet; she is no longer interested in games. “When I refused to be the child they knew and accepted me to be, I was called impudent and my muteness sullenness,” Angelou writes. She is sent to Arkansas to live with her grandma, never knowing if her St. Louis family “just got fed up with my grim presence… There is nothing more appalling than a constantly morose child.” Angelou only warms up to the idea of talking again when a woman tells her that “it takes the human voice to infuse [words] with the shades of deeper meaning.” You can see why Fiona—having also been raped outside her home at age 12, retreating inward and taking solace in the act of writing—would find strength in this. Her music, too, is all words, all messages to decode, a potent mix of literary ambition and raw truth; scaling the depths of her vocal register, she swings and punches and finesses phrases with smoke.