Every time I think of Fiona Apple this is what I think:

There's this like really beautiful young bride, like 22 or something and she marries this Wall Street guy and lives in his gigantic mansion all day long, pursuing her various pretentious pursuits (poetry, piano, spending his entire paycheck on pretty clothes) while the guy is out all day making money and cheating on her. Every day she sits in the enormous parlor of their mansion, getting loaded on really good wine, getting drunker and angrier and stewing on her sorry lot in life. By the time he gets home she hits him on some "I know you're cheating on me YOU BASTARD let me smell your dick why did I ever get married to you in the first place YOU RUINED MY LIFE I HATE YOU I need another $5000 for shoes tomorrow YOU THINK YOU'RE SO FUCKING SMART" type shit, then collapses into a trembling, weeping wreck.

Every single Fiona Apple song is basically from the point of view of this person.

Here's the OG version of Extraordinary Machine, the one that was produced by Jon Brion. Jon Brion doesn't generally really do much from what I can gather -- he did the When The Pawn album which is really good and put out a solo album of dense Beatlesy piano pop, and I think I read somewhere that he had a weekly gig at some LA bar where he just plays covers all night long. Sounds like someone's not living up to their potential! He also did music for a bunch of Paul Thomas Anderson films (including Punch Drunk Love who stars the chick he was going out/broke up with).

Anyways, this album was supposed to be her bigtime follow up but the label was all "where's the single, we're not putting this out, time to call up one of Dr Dre's ghost producers MIKE MOTHAFUCKIN ELIZONDO (???) to put some hip hop shine to these nonsensical maudlin weepy ballads!" and of course shelved the album indefinitely. Not unlike Pinkerton or Feeler, this album became a rallying point for extremely nerdy and annoying Fiona Apple fans for a long time afterwards.

In any event, I like it. I still think When The Pawn is a better album, but you can just buy that on iTunes, and a bunch of songs on this version are way different than the official one (except for the title track and I think one other one):

Fiona Apple ~ Extraordinary Machine (OG Jon Brion version)

 Edit Post