Fiona Apple Fetch the Bolt Cutters

After confirming in a sign language message that her new studio album was ready, singer-songwriter Fiona Apple gave an exclusive interview to the New Yorker and reveals details of her fifth studio record. The record, defined as “raw” and “with heavy percussion”, is entitled "Fetch the Bolt Cutters", and contains a total of 13 new tracks in the repertoire. Among them is "Newspaper", which features the vocals of Maude Maggart, Apple's sister who've appeared in "Hot Knife" from "The Idler Wheel...", a song about two women linked by their stories to an abusive man.

The name "Fetch the Bolt Cutters" is a reference to the series "The Fall" and the procedure of British policewoman played by Gillian Anderson as a sex crime investigator. Anderson's character uses the phrase after finding a locked door to a room where a girl was tortured. Like all Apple projects, this one was taking too long to emerge, reaching a slow process of creative self-inquiry that produced, over a quarter of a century, a set of narrow but profound letters. Her albums are deeply personal - tracing her sorrows, confrontations with her own fragility and her fierce phoenix-like recoveries - and musically audacious, increasingly wild and strange.

The first song that the artist recorded for the album is “On I Go”, inspired by a Vipassana meditation song. She sang on her phone while walking in Topanga Canyon. Back home, she dug up old lyrics, wrote new ones and held anarchic liaison sessions with her bandmates.

Another track, called “The Drumset Is Gone”, is a bitter song about rejection, created in a drunken discussion with members of the band, which has as its theme the end of the relationship with the writer Jonathan Ames. The new songs are full of spiky and layered wordplay.

In the article, there is a long section about her intense romance with filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, and a story about how she left cocaine after a miserable night with Anderson at Quentin Tarantino's home: “Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with Q.T. and P.T.A. on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again”.

1. I Want You to Love Me
2. Shameika
3. Fetch The Bolt Cutters
4. Under The Table
5. Relay
6. Rack of His
7. Newspaper
8. Ladies
9. Heavy Balloon
10. Cosmonauts
11. For Her
12. Drumset
13. On I Go

01 I Want You to Love Me
02 Shameika
03 Fetch the Bolt Cutters
04 Under the Table
05 Relay
06 Rack of His
07 Newspaper
08 Ladies
09 Heavy Balloon
10 Cosmonauts
11 For Her
12 Drumset
13 On I Go