Fiona Apple finds musical happiness
Nekesa Moody

NEW YORK—When Fiona Apple first heard about the Web site freefiona.com, she remembers feeling flattered, overwhelmed - and guilty. That’s because while fans were mounting an ambitious Internet campaign on her behalf, accusing Apple’s record company of squashing a brilliant album because it wasn’t commercial enough, she didn’t want to see “Extraordinary Machine” released either - at least not the version widely circulating on the Web.
“I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted,” she says of “Extraordinary Machine,” which was finally released Tuesday after a monthslong saga that cast Apple as an artist being subjugated by her powerful record label, Epic Records, a division of Sony Music. The truth was murkier. Though Apple claims Sony didn’t like the original version of the album because they didn’t hear any hits on it, she was dissatisfied with it, too, for other reasons.
“I kind of checked out, I wasn’t there to be the captain of the ship and say how I wanted things to be musically,” she says. The album initially was produced by longtime friend and producer Jon Brion, who had worked on her best-selling, groundbreaking debut album, 1996’s “Tidal,” and its follow-up, 1999’s “When the Pawn.”
“In this case, I don’t know what was going on in my head so much - trepidation about what was ahead of me, a lack of confidence, I don’t know what it was,” she says. Apple hadn’t even been pushing to record an album. The singer-songwriter, who lives in Venice, Calif., was happily living out of the spotlight, burned by her previous brush with celebrity.
“Tidal” made her one of the most heralded voices to emerge during the ‘90s boom of strong female singer-songwriters: Her poignant lyrics and frankness about past pain (including a childhood rape) made her a critics’ darling. But she was also depicted as vitriolic and disturbed. Her very public struggles over her newfound celebrity, including occasional outbursts and crying fits on stage, made her an object of ridicule and gossip.
So she pulled away from the media’s glare. She barely promoted “When the Pawn” - and to date, it has sold a little more than 920,000 copies, about a third of her first album’s 2.7 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. “I tried to leave my own little bubble as little as possible,” says the still waifish 28-year-old Apple, her wide eyes reflecting the hurt.