When the year's 'Extraordinary Machine' (the dual disc was out after my own patience was) appeared, I thought it must have been the doing of a time travel one! For a near birthday present, that was great.
Nobody's called Paris the "Big Apple" but when this week, the sensible city mayor we've got now sent everybody brochures to say he wants to make it green and get rid of lots of the traffic, I thought: "More power to you, mate! I hope you keep it long enough to do this."
I thought if Fiona Apple would lend me the key for a bit, I could borrow hers to take a trip forwards and find out what had come first, a city emptied of selfish sods who have no need to use their cars every day as it is or one as tough to live in as Berlin was in the late '20s and 1930s.
The chilliness there had nothing to do with recent shifts in the Gulf Stream; it was political and economic. Adolf Hitler thought he had the answers, including even a "final solution". Fiona sounded like she'd been so attentive to risk-taking people who disagreed with him and said so musically in public before it got too dangerous to hang around any more I was astonished.
 On album number three, I heard so much of it my first impression was the woman had taken that Berlin cabaret sound and style, picked it up, updated it in her unique way and plonked it down in the New York of 2005. Again I listened to some of the boldest and bravest protesters of those appalling years as the Nazis grabbed power and made Guantanamo Bay seem like an almost acceptable, even mildly civilised place, compared with what Hitler's concentrations camps were set to become.
Then I listened to Fiona again. The musical and Bob Fosse's film of 'Cabaret' are timeless classics. Of the men and women who lived the times that inspired both, many are undeservedly forgotten, but not Lotte Lenya, nor the Kurt Weill she sings on that great album and others. Weill's collaborations with Bertold Brecht remain among the best known of kind of source I first heard in 'Extraordinary Machine'.
Apple, "enigmatic, ... stlll resonates," Joan Anderson of the Boston Globe reckoned in the week. She's certainly outspoken in lyrics that everybody who's made her a part of their world got very impatient to hear: the big fuss over the pre-release on the Net of this album, so long in the making by a perfectionist, is still being discussed.
That version of it never did come my way. Listening often to the one on the shelves I've toned down my amazement at the cabaret content to say it's sure there but no more than a part of a whole where Fiona sometimes does fearful things to a piano as she occasionally does with men. She abuses both even more than she did on 'Tidal' and on 'When the Pawn Drops...' (the Wikipedia is the best place to find the full title of what comes after those dots, which is famously enormous and includes the memorable line, "There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind is Your Might'.
This had to be correct if only because 'Ask Men' (their Apple bio) can't make up it's own mind about Fiona's sex appeal, starts going on about what's conventionally gorgeous and what isn't in such a "waif". If anybody cares, I have no such problem. She's hardly starving and she's strong. She's unkind to some guys. When she might have prematurely ditched one "who was getting my hopes up", then failed, sho she decided he was really in for it:
"Wait 'til I get him back
He won't have a back to scratch."
They are nearly all songs about love on 'Extraordinary Machine' and darned good ones too, sad and the biter often bitten is sensible, unless it was wise to get stuck on a guy with a "fortressed face":
"Oh you silly, stupid pastime of mine
You were always good for a rhyme
- And from the first to all the last times, all the signs
Said 'Stop' -- but we went on whole-hearted
It ended bad, but I love what we started" (Parting Gift).
Those Berlin singers often left the politics out of it too, apart from the sexual ones, where they let real freedom in and broke all kinds of social "rules" since in the life outside the club doors there was even less genuine freedom than in today's world where it's a word politicians spout frequently to the most evil and violent of ends.
Fiona is angrily articulate. Something called 'Tymps - 'The Sick in the Head Song' where
"Those boon times went bust
My feet of clay, they dried to dust
The red isn't the red we painted
I's just rust (...)",
plus a look at complimentary colours the girl can't make sense of in 'Red, Red, Red', could almost have been penned in those years, and help make -- like her music with its catchy clarity, unsentimental style and lyrics that stick in your head -- an album to last.
Fiona calls herself frightened and fickle, says somewhere she's sick of melodies, maladies and apologies too and even
"If you don't have a song to sing
You're OK".
That may be right, but those are the opening lines of her 'Waltz'. She can be sing "no more melodies" if she likes, but if she's going to go on turning out tunes that linger so long, that's nonsense.
Stuff worth a read was written in March by Mark Morford at SFGate during the storm regarding "a flood of unreleased bootlegs sung by a goddess". His "bottom line", after points of style and an unmerited slap mainly at newcomers Apple had just squashed underfoot, was about the corporate machine. Morford says the RIAA and nobody else will put down anyone with talent now "commercial dictatorship is crumbling".
But his own put-downs were silly. So, with time, was his main question, 'Who will free Fiona?' Her home site is about yet another great-looking, gifted girl who takes her time and plays with time in her music; it's one of her skills, successful "mismatching".
She doesn't need freeing, sings of highs and lows using both in her music, which makes one of this log's good intros to people stuck on the classical kind who'd like to branch out. She says in her bio:
"All these things you're trying to protect me from, I make something out of it. So I'm fine and please stop looking at me that way! (...)
It's not like my inner basket case is absent, it's just that I've lived with it long enough that I can manage it now."
Her outlook's a smart one and I'd happily bet she's far nicer to the whole range of singers who have different gifts from hers, ways of expressing them and ways of learning to do so than the numerous people who review their albums and write they'd do better to have what she's got herself.
[Edito: This is codswallop, that reflects far more on the reviewers than their "victims". Unless I find time for the other one often taken to make such dismissive comparisons, Fiona's probably the final chick of the year who's already won a reputation among people who visit to read what I hear in the "famous", for I've decided any "best of" or "anti-best of" devised for the log won't be published until 2005 is behind us.
December's already given me some new surprises apart from a 'Best of 2005" on the shelves by 'Les Inrocks', which is only surprising in being so boringly banal and with so few women in it at all I've now subscribed to 'Rockrgrl Magazine', though, like a lot of US mags, they charge Europeans as much for postage (maybe they must, I dunno) as for a subscription, thus confirming people are right: I do have expensive tastes in women!
But they're too good.] Fiona's wise and asks people to "stop looking at her that way" just because she is young.
If 2005 isn't the year I've learned for sure wisdom and age have absolutely nothing to do with one another, I never shall! Fiona looks fragile and may deliver that frail image still; the industrial reason people felt she needed freeing is provided with a perceptive and understanding ear by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker, with another reminder she got raped at 12.
When first Fiona's 'Tidal' wave swept me away, I'd no idea what she looked like, let alone that she was "just 19". Nor do I have any idea if she's really a Lotte Lenya fan and was influenced. All told, she remains a pretty private person.
However, to some of the new, young generation of people reading this log, I'd again say thanks for wising me up! My already long entries would be interminable if I began to quote enough lyrics to prove the point about wisdom. Sure, listen to your elders, there's nothing wrong with "old-fashioned advice and obedience" when the reasons make sense, but don't underrate what you've got; you see, it seems they're also coming here to find out more about you.
5:07:48 PM link 
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