Fiona Apple’s ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ is a catalyst for connection
In my appointment book, which I’d bought back when you could make appointments, I keep a list of names. Lana, Rina, Alexandra and anyone else who promised new music was recorded in my book on New Year’s Eve. These were my prospective patron saints of 2020. The one with the most potential was written at the top, in all caps: Fiona Apple.
And Fiona has delivered—both the album of the year with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, and me from a world plagued by cynicism, catastrophe and that other C-word. Maybe if I had had an inkling of what a musical monument Bolt Cutters was going to be, I would have been more impatient. I would have begged, no matter how much it disagrees with me, for its release in any of the eight years since Fiona’s last one.
But Fiona takes her time. Her fans, like Shirley Manson and St. Vincent, muster all the equanimity of a monk, waiting to hear from our favourite hermit. Fiona also has a sense of timing, something that fellow wordsmith Jenny Holzer would call “the mark of a genius.” She dropped Bolt Cutters, an album made in isolation, when everyone was living in it.
Yet she doesn’t sound cut off from the world at all. In fact, Bolt Cutters is how she finds her way back. The album is her most collaborative, composed with sublime vocal harmonies with her sister and her texting buddy, Cara Delevingne. It was produced in her home with her band, all of them forming what Fiona describes as “a ‘tubular’ heart… Not to each their own chamber.”
That’s what Bolt Cutters sounds like to me: a beating heart. Its 13 songs are full-blooded and alive, fleshed out with one-take percussion tracks and piano playing paced to match Fiona’s pulse. And not forgetting all the slip-ups that slipped through the tracks, including dog barks and muttered curses. Welcome to the sound of Fiona, unfiltered.
What ties the whole musical mélange together is Fiona’s voice, her best instrument. It chants, chirps and croons, flowing through a spectrum of emotions. Fiona takes us through every chapter of her most studied subject, from loving to longing, resentment to resignation. But the loudest of them is also the rarest to hear today: hope.
The album opens with Fiona singing, “I want you to love me,” no longer begging to be left alone. It’s a radical declaration, considering her discography is rife with gems mined from bitter breakups, doomed relationships and the solitude of being misunderstood. Yet she’s all the wiser for it. Just listen to Cosmonauts, a love song with a down-to-earth perspective.
But it’s not just romance that she seeks. After all, there are as many kinds of loves as there are hearts, as Tolstoy wrote (and Fiona echoes in Ladies). Her hands, once too shaky to hold, now reach out to all the ladies, ladies, ladies in her life, with whom her ties have always been tangled. The list is exhaustive, ranging from a middle-school acquaintance named Shameika to the recipients of Newspaper, who share an abusive ex with Fiona.
Her compassion extends even to the loneliest of us, who will find solace and strength in her depression anthem, Heavy Balloon. And almost everyone will identify with the album’s title track, a call to arms to “fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long.” The song can be applied in a literal sense to the lockdown we are living under, but also to the one that we have imposed upon ourselves long before, as Fiona explains: “Get yourself out of the situation that you’re in—whatever it is that you don’t like. Even if you can’t do it physically.”
And that’s what she did. Bolt Cutters is not made by the wunderkind who was nicknamed Fiona Lone. It’s made by a woman who, after years of being ridiculed and reduced to labels like crazy, difficult, and hysterical, has decided to reclaim her place in the world. And the world, to her disbelief, has embraced her back, with rave reviews and an appreciation of her artistry. Celebrities celebrate her. She even became a trending topic on Twitter, something I have never seen in all my years of being a part of her cult following.
But more inspiring to me are the connections that she is now making, after a lifetime of seeking them. “When I was a kid, all I wanted was to go out and do things and be with my friends,” she reveals. “And since I wasn’t invited or because I was told I was too intense to be friends with, I learned to make [being alone] my comfort place.” I could say the same for myself: I had a handful of friends in my early teens, and absolutely none in college. Last year, I lost a best friend of almost a decade. And that’s to say nothing of all my fruitless romances.
My self-isolation is a self-fulfilling prophecy that I am still trying to break free from. I would say I’ve gotten a lot better at it; I no longer cultivate a callus of not caring. That’s mostly thanks to Fiona, who has always made an example of giving a damn, even if it’s to her detriment. With Bolt Cutters, she finally reaps her rewards.
Fiona’s panoply of songs are an antidote for my jaded generation, whose members toss around the phrase “emotionally unavailable” as carelessly as their companions. She is my crowbar, prying open a world of intimacy and vulnerability—all the more precious now that the present is marked by Zoom calls, FaceTime dates and concerts that are live-streamed. And with her stentorian voice, she teaches me how to live. I only hope everyone else is listening, too.
This article was written by Pameyla Cambe and first published on Lifestyle Asia Singapore on April 27 2020.