It’s a song written when US Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, accused of sexual assault, was being nominated.
The songs and lyrics (always complex and open to different interpretations) are deeper. Her jazz-influenced piano is there, of course, but percussion has increased in proportion the double bass appears prominently and there are choral interludes. None of Apple’s previous albums has the complexity and unpredictability of Fetch The Bolt Cutters.Īpple has moved to a much more multilayered sound. The album was eight years in the making, and it shows. Fetch The Bolt Cutters was released on 17 April in a locked-down world in the throes of a pandemic. It’s a spare and minimalistic album-her singing accompanied only by piano and percussion, and it grows on the listener.īut it’s with her fifth studio album that Apple has scaled soaring heights.
But those who get it become part of her cult.Īpple’s fourth album, also with a long title ( The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than The Driver Of The Screw And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do), followed in 2012. Apple’s idiosyncratic arrangements, singing and scatting styles and intricate, often complex lyrics (example: What you did to me made me see myself somethin’ awful/ A voice once stentorian is now again meek and muffled/ It took me such a long time to get back up the first time you did it/ I spent all I had to get it back, and now it seems I’ve been out-bidded) don’t make her music easily accessible. When The Pawn…was followed, in 2005, by Extraordinary Machine, yet another excellent album, which, like her second one, requires multiple listens to fully absorb. Apple was only 22 at the time but her jazz-meets-pop compositions had already become much more mature and her vocal style exuded a singularity so striking that it was difficult to pin down who or what her big influences were.