Song Of The Week - June 10

In light of Fiona Apple’s upcoming fourth album, The Idler Wheel…, which is set for release on June 19, I’ve been digging into her discography trying to get to know her better. I’ve listened mostly to her quirky pop masterpiece Extraordinary Machine, released to wide critical acclaim in 2005. The title track, in particular, has captivated me this past week.

Unlike her first two albums, the production on most of this album’s tracks is cleaner and less cluttered, giving Apple’s songs some room to breath. On “Extraordinary Machine,” I was immediately drawn into the curious, hiccupping backing track, which sounds like a mix of marimba, bells, keyboard strings, real strings, and bassoon. (Although I suspect some of it was thrown together on a bunch of keyboards.) At first, the vocal performance and Apple’s lyrics seemed almost like a secondary concern.

Repeat listens, however, draw out Apple’s performance. Starting off with a run of 14 (count ‘em!) notes that dance lightly on the same G# (if my ear is anything close to right…), Apple challenges the listener from the start. It put me in mind a little of Ingrid Michaelson’s song “Soldier,” which also bravely opens with a daunting 21 notes on the same pitch. When used correctly, it’s a masterful technique for building tension in the song, but Apple’s use is far more accomplished. While Michaelson releases that tension and never reclaims it, while Apple builds a series of jumpy rises and falls around how she stalks that G#.

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Of course, it’s not only about the notes she sings, but how she sings them. Blessed with a jazzy contralto voice, Apple shifts gears at the end of the first phrase (“I certainly haven't been shopping for any new shoes”) with the higher “and,” which releases the musical tension even as it lyrically creates more. That “and” moment, which she uses again in the next verse, provides a neat study lyric relating to music, a push forward and a pull back, two opposing forces caught up in a single word.

Lyrically, Apple seems less interested in meaning; the song is vague to the point of being unintelligible. One possible reading of the lyrics is that they are a woman’s reflection on the end of a troubled relationship and the happy circumstance of her being more “comfortable” in the aftermath than he is. She finds out, to the possible chagrin of the “opponent,” that she is an “extraordinary machine.” For starters, if that’s the storyline being pursued here, Apple makes some truly odd language choices—who knows what “he’ll hitch a ride with any guide” means? But, more than for meaning, Apple seems to choose the words she does for their sound

For example, take a look at the lines “I seem to you to seek a new disaster every day. / You deem me due to clean my view and be at peace and lay.” Unusual for song lyrics, this couplet is in iambic heptameter, something you can hear in how she stresses the lines. In the second line, every second syllable begins with a ‘plosive’ sound with the exception of the ‘v’ in “view” and the ‘l’ in “lay” (d, d, k, [v], b, p, [l]). But besides her play with ‘plosives’ and iambs, she also weaves in patterns of rhyme and assonance between the lines:

I seem / You deem

To you / me due

To seek / to clean

A new / my view

[Disa— / and be]

—ster e— / at peace

—v’ry day / and lay

Of course, Apple does not treat the entirety of the song with this complex weave of poetic devices, but she does maintain the iambic tone throughout. The question remains, though, of what use this lyrical trickery is to Apple, especially if the song lacks in obvious meaning.

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Most people have heard the story (one that I long thought was apocryphal, but apparently is true) about how Paul McCartney used substitute lyrics for the song “Yesterday” when he was trying to nail down the melody. Instead of the famous first lines, the song once began with: “Scrambled eggs / oh, my baby, how I love your legs.” The songwriting practice of dropping in dud lyrics was a common one for both Lennon and McCartney and certainly one that many songwriters employ. But what does that practice tell us about the relationship between lyrics and music?

This song by Apple is lyrically fascinating, because Apple has made what seems like a conscious choice to largely disregard meaning in favor of ‘sound.’ She’s interested in the patterns she can pull together with words, the fabric that she can weave…not so much in what those sentences actually communicate. “Extraordinary Machine” finds her savoring the words as words. She opens up the space between lyrics and music within this song; the lyrics are not important for meaning, but for their sound, for the resonances she creates among these words. I look forward to seeing how she plays with words on The Idler Wheel...