Fiona Apple, When The Pawn… (note: see product commentsfor full title)
Featured Album
A still-fiery Fiona’s smoldering second album
Fiona Apple is a mess. A beautiful, brilliant mess, but a mess all the same. Throughout her career she's cultivated a reputation as a damaged flower, the sullen girl whose tear-jerking ballads and fiery kiss-offs bristle with an impotent rage that can't quite mask her vulnerability. A total meltdown is always looming — in the most alluring, cathartic way. Her second album, 1999′s When the Pawn…, is Fiona at her best: brooding, defiantly eccentric, but somehow still in control. Credit producer Jon Brion with arranging majestic, sophisticated songs that are more challenging, more off-kilter than your typical singer/songwriter breakup fare. But make no mistake: they still pack an emotional punch.
"Hell don't know my fury," warns Apple on the album's opening track, and her rage continues to smolder from there. Songs like "Fast As You Can" and "Limp" are irate tongue twisters, Apple spitting out lyrics like "And when I think of it/My fingers turn to fists/I never did anything to you, man." But anger is only one stage of grief, and there is no better way to mourn dashed romantic dreams than with the torchy "Paper Bag," one of the best songs about unrequited love ever. If Apple is all agony and madness and gaping wounds, then the album's most surprising moment comes when she reveals her softer, more complacent side in the quietly stunning "I Know". Instead of picking fights or stirring up trouble, here she abandons her pride in order to cling to tiny scraps of the unavailable man she loves. In doing so she reveals herself to be the kind of woman who can say "It's OK" when it's clearly not OK at all. Now if that isn't madness, what is?
