A cynic would say the guy courting the girl in Fiona Apple’s songs is simply pursuing his next ex. Beyond the fact that ‘all happy lovers are alike, but each unhappy lover is unhappy in their own way’ (to put a twist on Tolstoy); beyond the fact that songwriters are driven to write about ‘failure’ (break-ups, attempts at relationship) but never feel compelled to write about ‘success’ (being together); beyond the fact that ‘Layla’ will always be more moving than ‘Wonderful Tonight’, ‘A Case of You’ than ‘Underneath the Streetlight’, ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’ than ‘Wedding Song’, what remains true is that the heroine’s situation across Fiona’s entire repertoire (including, then, ‘The Way Things Are’) is more structural than circumstantial. ‘Fear of intimacy’, I hear the pop psychologist say, ‘she feels unlovable and behaves in a way to confirm it’. But what if, as Adam Phillips argues, ‘if you want to have a relationship with someone, you have to become a problem for them’? What if ‘we don’t have relationships to get our needs met, we have relationships to discover what our needs might be’? If people ‘know they are in a relationship when they become a problem to each other’, wouldn’t the way out of the relationship-revolving-door be to acknowledge one’s needs rather than to flee? I leave you, dear reader, to decide, and trust you will keep in mind Fiona’s reflexive sophistication.

Adam Phillips, On Balance (London: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Books, 2010) p. 29 & p. 34

‘Why Do You Love Me’ is the cry of a woman who doesn’t want love to disturb her unlovable-girl equilibrium. She refuses her suitor’s love because she knows how disruptive accepting it would be. Although she is tempted—’You’ve still got the most beautiful face’—she’s convinced happiness is not available to her: ‘It just makes me sad most of the time’. She doesn’t make much of her suspicion that her would-be lover may be ‘sleeping with a friend’ of hers (a clear case of vicarious consummation—her fantasy, his fact?). What she dwells on instead is her ugly-duckling, bad-girl persona: ‘I am not as pretty as those girls in magazines’, ‘I’ve done ugly things, and I have made mistakes’, ‘Now I’ve held back a wealth of shit, I think I’m gonna choke’. She is bent on maintaining her equilibrium and refuses to be drawn into love. And yet, something in her wants to give up control, to let go, for why else would the suitor’s love be ‘driving [her] crazy’? The would-be lover, according to the beloved, is ‘sick of all the rules’ (what rules?) and the beloved is ‘sick of all [his] lies’ (what lies?). I’m not convinced. This strikes me as a rationalization of her fear of accepting (and returning) love.

THE WAY THINGS ARE
Fiona Apple, ‘When the Pawn’, 1999

I wouldn’t know what to do with another chance if you gave it to me
I couldn’t take the embrace of a real romance, it’d race right through me

I’m much better off the way things are
Much much better off, better by far, by far

I wouldn’t know what to say to a gentle voice, it’d roll right past me
And if you chalk it up you’ll see I don’t really have a choice, so don’t even ask me

I’m much better off, the way things are
Much much better off, better by far, by far

So keep on calling me names, keep on, keep on
And I’ll keep kicking the crap till it’s gone
If you keep on killing you could get me to settle
And as soon as I settle I bet I’ll be able to move on

How can I fight when we’re on the same side?
How can I fight beside you?

So keep on calling me names, keep on, keep on
And I’ll keep kicking the crap till it’s gone
If you keep on killing you could get me to settle
And as soon as I settle I bet I’ll be able to move on

WHY DO YOU LOVE ME
Garbage, ‘Bleed Like Me’, 2005

I’m no Barbie doll, I’m not your baby girl
I’ve done ugly things, and I have made mistakes
And I am not as pretty as those girls in magazines
I am rotten to my core if they’re to be believed

So what if I’m no baby bird hanging upon your every word
Nothing ever smells of roses that rises out of mud

Why do you love me?
It’s driving me crazy
Why do you love me?

You’re not some little boy, why you acting so surprised
You’re sick of all the rules, well I’m sick of all your lies
Now I’ve held back a wealth of shit I think I’m gonna choke
I’m standing in the shadows with the words stuck in my throat

Does it really come as a surprise when I tell you I don’t feel good
That nothing ever came from nothing, man, oh man, ain’t that the truth

Why do you love me?
It’s driving me crazy
Why do you love me?

I get back up and I do it again, get back up and I do it again

I think you’re sleeping with a friend of mine, I have no proof, but I think that I’m right
You’ve still got the most beautiful face, it just makes me sad most of the time

I get back up and I do it again, get back up and I do it again

Why do you love me?
It’s driving me crazy
Why do you love me?

Second, where the couple in ‘Regret’, mired in the miasma of psychology, abase themselves, the couple in ‘Shooting Star’, by transcending psychology, elevate themselves. It is telling that ‘Regret’ begins with an evocation of the couple arguing about ‘the concept of regret’. Yes, the concept of regret. Where they should be verbalizing their feelings and listening to each other, they talk at each other in concepts. Neither calls out the other’s bad faith; instead, they collaborate to sabotage any chance of connection. In ‘Shooting Star’, in contrast, reflection arises out of feeling; it is organic, not game-playing. ‘We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky’, Leonard Cohen sings in ‘Stories of the Street’, and this feeling is present, at least between the lines, in the Dylan song too. The image of the shooting star casts the couple as ‘two individuals alone in the universe’, adding ‘existential salt’, as it were, to their situation.

We can hear this directly in the phrases ‘you’re trying to break into another world, a world I never knew’ (‘what is given is given, but each of us frames and constructs his own experience’; cf. Sartre) and ‘tomorrow will be another day’ (‘the absurd’, ‘revolt’, cf. Camus). And we can hear it indirectly in the lines ‘I thought of me, if I was still the same, if I ever became what you wanted me to be; did I miss the mark, overstep the line that only you could see?’. These lines ‘resonate existentially’ in that they evoke the unbridgeable separation between human beings, the inaccessibility of one consciousness to another. That Dylan’s couple reached out to each other across these constraints but failed to enduringly establish a relation is no shame: the dignity of the song testifies to the nobility of the attempt. ‘Regret’, in contrast, never transcends the mundane; the interpersonal confrontation lacks a fulcrum (such as the shooting star in the Dylan song) to lever it from the sterility of invective to something more fecund. Dylan’s perspective allows him to show his couple some kindness; Fiona’s, only cruelty.

‘Listen to the engine, listen to the bell; as the last fire truck from hell goes rolling by, all good people are praying. It’s the last temptation, the last account, last time you might hear the Sermon on the Mount; the last radio is playing’: With these lines Dylan changes the pace from deliberate to hasty; there’s a sense of urgency, even panic, brought on, perhaps, by an intensified feeling of frustration. By evoking the Sermon on the Mount, he makes a fulcrum of Christian ethics to lever his reflections on a relationship that, despite the love that was there, didn’t work out. The songwriter of ‘Regret’, in contrast, gives her couple no fulcrum, no means to lever themselves out of the miasma of recrimination they are stuck in: in their goldfish bowl of ‘hot piss’ they are condemned to go round and round, oblivious to the world outside.

As in many a Fiona song, the heroine in ‘Regret’ fulminates against her ex. Could the merry-go-round of exes be one and the same figure of what the Ur-heroine needs to rail against? In other words, does she choose her lovers precisely in order to turn them into her figure of the ex? Nothing original there: couples therapy is filled with such cases. What might be more interesting is to cast the Ur-heroine as someone suffering from claustrophobia, where the room is not a space but a person: the lover himself.

ADAM PHILLIPS: ‘One of the most striking features of people who suffer from claustrophobia is that for them, the way out is not through the door. Knowing where the exits are can ease the anxiety, but it rarely cures it. Few rooms are actually incarcerating, but for the claustrophobic person it is as though spaces are always experienced—in a sense must be experienced—as confined. One can feel contained by something enclosing, but the claustrophobic person can only feel persecuted. There is something in the room that has to be fled from, but it appears to be in the space itself. Apparently, the only convincing cure for this malady, from the sufferer’s point of view, is flight, is to get out. The claustrophobic person is therefore an amateur escape artist. He needs, in order to survive psychically, to be ingenious and inventive about his exits and entrances.’

Adam Phillips, Houdini’s Box: The Art of Escape (New York: Vintage Books, 2002) pp. 54-55

If one can speak of tragedy in a post-tragic world, the tragedy of Fiona Apple’s heroines is that, like the girl in the horror film who barricades her house against the killer only to find that the killer is already in the house with her, her diagnosis of her situation is wrong. Indeed, however ‘ingenious and inventive’ she may be about her exits and entrances, her flights and fights for psychic survival, she will never—no matter how vitriolic her invective, no matter how primal her scream—do more than ‘survive’ a relationship as long as the director of the theater of her mind—herself—is not held to account.

REGRET
Fiona Apple, ‘The Idler Wheel’, 2012

R’member when we argued on the concept of regret?
You were an expert even then but not me, not yet
Now all you gotta do’s remind me that we met
And there you got me, that’s how you got me, you taught me to regret

R’member how I asked you why are you so mean?
You didn’t know how to react to being seen
I tried to be your friend, you made me ashamed, so I’m getting mean
And there you got me, that’s how you got me, you taught me to be mean

But I ran out of white dove’s feathers
To soak up the hot piss that comes through your mouth
Every time you address me

R’member when I was so sick and you didn’t believe me?
Then you got sick too and guess who took care of you?
You hated that, didn’t you? Didn’t you?
Now when you look at me, you’re condemned to see
The monster your mother made you to be
And there you got me, that’s how you got free, you got rid of me

And now I ran out of white dove feathers
To soak up the hot piss that comes through your mouth
Every time you address me

Alone
Leave me alone

SHOOTING STAR
Bob Dylan, ‘Oh Mercy’, 1989

Seen a shooting star tonight and I thought of you
You’re trying to break into another world, a world I never knew
I always kinda wondered if you ever made it through
Seen a shooting star tonight and I thought of you

Seen a shooting star tonight and I thought of me
If I was still the same, if I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark, overstep the line that only you could see
Seen a shooting star tonight and I thought of me

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell goes rolling by
All good people are praying

It’s the last temptation, the last account
Last time you might hear the Sermon on the Mount
The last radio is playing

Seen a shooting star tonight slip away
Tomorrow will be another day
Guess it’s too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say
Seen a shooting star tonight slip away

At one and the same time, ‘Shadowboxer’ captures both the disillusionment of romance and the romance of disillusionment. Therein, for me, lies its greatness: it is the finest song I know about the push-pull of love. Fiona Apple’s performance is spellbinding; lyrics, music, voice and arrangement concur to convey this duality with utter conviction. ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’, sing The Teddy Bears, but the heroine of ‘Shadowboxer’ would beg to disagree (if begging didn’t disagree with her): falling in love (to reverse the equation) is not a good way to know someone. And yet, having had a taste of complicity in a couple, she knows that ‘getting to know him’ (and his getting to know her) is the foundation of being together. Push-pull. But eroticism, central in this song, requires shape-shifting, identity displacement: the ‘you’ of ‘I know you’ is not erotic. So just what does the heroine want? James Brown has the answer: a ‘sex machine’. Or is it, after all, just ‘good, good loving’? At any rate, the lover here is off the boil, and the heroine is hip to the condescension in his ‘let’s be friends’ gambit. Still, she can’t help but acknowledge that, in submitting to him sexually, she discovered something about herself, and now that the tide of his ‘love’ is ebbing, she is left stranded. Her ‘concern’ that he has no ‘reverence’ for can only be, in my reading, a sexual awakening, a journey to the end of the night that stopped well before the dawn. Since there’ll be no more sex, the heroine will fall back on what’s second best: shadowboxing, fighting in fantasy, sex without the mess (of relationship).

Like ‘Shadowboxer’, ‘Support System’ is a song about a sexually attractive lover withdrawing. Liz Phair’s take on it, however, is very different from Fiona Apple’s. Her heroine frankly acknowledges her needs: ‘I don’t need a support system’, she sings (echoing the rejection by Fiona’s heroine of the ‘let’s be friends’ gambit); instead, what she needs is a ‘man of action’ and her ‘attraction’ to him. In other words, she needs their sexual relationship, she needs to be driven down ‘all those dangerous avenues’ where ‘lions and tigers tear at their food’ (as fine an image of lovemaking as any). The place sex with her lover takes her to is a place where she blossoms. Where Fiona’s heroine acts unilaterally (as her heroines generally do), Liz’s heroine proposes dialogue and discussion: ‘Let’s think this whole thing through. Tell me, just what the hell is a lover supposed to do?’. Having given her side of the story, she then tells her ambivalent lover that she, for her part, has made up her mind: ‘Put your hand on my heart and listen: What I need is a dedication to last me all the way through; I’m counting on loving you over and above the passion: I’m connected to you.’ Where Fiona’s heroines, when faced with relationship challenges, typically withdraw—’Alone, leave me alone’—Liz Phair’s heroine, strong enough to make herself vulnerable, cuts the crap and declares her abiding love.

SHADOWBOXER
Fiona Apple, ‘Tidal’, 1996

Once my lover now my friend
What a cruel thing to pretend
What a cunning way to condescend
Once my lover, and now my friend

Oh, you creep up like the clouds and you set my soul at ease
Then you let your love abound and you bring me to my knees

Oh, it’s evil, babe, the way you let your grace enrapture me
When well you know I’d be insane to ever let that dirty game recapture me

You made me a shadowboxer, baby
I wanna be ready for what you do
Well I been swinging around me
‘Cause I don’t know when you’re gonna make your move

Oh, your gaze is dangerous and you fill your space so sweet
If I let you get too close you’ll set your spell on me
So darling I just wanna say just in case I don’t come through
I was on to every play, I just wanted you

But, oh, it’s so evil, my love, the way you’ve
No reverence to my concern
So I’ll be sure to stay wary of you, love
To save the pain of once my flame and twice my burn

So I’m a shadowboxer, baby
I wanna be ready for what you do
Well I been swinging around at nothing
I don’t know when you’re gonna make your move

SUPPORT SYSTEM
Liz Phair, ‘Whip-Smart’, 1994

I don’t need a support system
Lifting me into proposition
What I need is a man of action
I need my attraction to you
Driving me down all those dangerous avenues
Lions and tigers tearing at their food

I know the gossip flies around at breakfast
One of them reigns in your hand
Where do you get the fuck off thinking I was there at the party?
‘Cause all of my friends feed me the evil reasons
Why you and I should not be friends
Let’s think this whole thing through
Tell me, just what the hell is a lover supposed to do?
I got the wrong reaction—a slap in the face from you

This is such a stupid picture
Wrap me in a steak
Why don’t you throw me in the panther cage
And maybe then I’ll like you better

I don’t need a support system
Lifting me into proposition
What they make is a separation of beauty from attitude
What satisfaction is left when all you do
Tells everyone you’re acting untrue?

This is such a stupid picture
Light a cigarette
Why don’t you stub it in the carburetor
And maybe then you’ll sell me something

I don’t need a support system
Put your hand on my heart and listen
What I need is a dedication to last me all the way through
Pointing the finger I’m counting on loving you over and above the passion
I’m connected to you

Poetically, ‘Werewolf’ and ‘Is This What You Wanted?’ are similar in structure. Leonard Cohen’s hero expresses what years of cohabitation have come to, and Fiona Apple’s performs, with a view to psychic reconciliation, a relationship postmortem. Each song comments in alternating lines on both self and partner. Cohen’s lyric abounds in black humour; his tone is self-mocking and his touch is light. Nevertheless, anyone who’s ever been in a long-term relationship will feel the weight of his words, particularly in the refrain: ‘Is this what you wanted, to live in a house that is haunted by the ghost of you and me?’. Indeed, the ‘haunted house’ vividly conveys the mechanism that makes communication impossible once couples have drifted apart. Fiona’s lyric shares the tone of Cohen’s, but the two differ in that Fiona’s is performative, it aims at reconciliation, while Cohen’s is simply a statement of fact.

‘Nothing wrong when a song ends in the minor key’: The getting of wisdom has been hard for Fiona’s heroine; having expunged bitterness, she is now in a better place. One can’t help but notice, however, that avoidance—‘We could still support each other, all we gotta do is avoid each other’—remains her coping mechanism of choice. One wonders how, when she systematically refuses engagement, she can ever grow.  How will she ever get beyond the vicissitudes of the interpersonal? ‘You defied your solitude, I came through alone’: With this line, Leonard Cohen, for his part, gives the banality of boredom in a couple—the human, all too human impasse couples get into—just a touch of something transcendent, something bigger than the experience of one couple. In doing so, he goes beyond rhetoric and into poetry: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (Yeats). Solitude is our state, the couple an attempt to overcome it: Leonard Cohen, with ‘Is This What You Wanted?’, makes out of the common coin of cultural cliché a song that attests to the dignity of the attempt—even when it all goes wrong. Fiona Apple’s heroines, every so often, are content with rhetoric.

W.B. Yeats, ‘Anima Hominis’ (‘The Soul of Man’) in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Through the Friendly Silences of the Moon [a line from Virgil]), 1918.

WEREWOLF
Fiona Apple, ‘The Idler Wheel’, 2012

I could liken you to a werewolf
The way you left me for dead
But I admit that I provided a full moon

And I could liken you to a shark
The way you bit off my head
But then again I was waving around a bleeding open wound

But you were such a super guy
Till the second you get away from me
We’re like a wishing well
And a bolt of electricity
But we could still support each other
All we gotta do is avoid each other

Nothing wrong when a song ends in the minor key

The lava of a volcano
Shot up hot from under the sea
One thing leads to another
And you made an island of me

And I could liken you to a chemical
The way you made me compound to compound
But I’m a chemical too
Inevitable you and me would mix

And I could liken you to a lot of things
But I always come around
Cause in the end I’m a sensible girl
I know the fiction of the fix

But you were such a super guy
Till the second you get away from me
We’re like a wishing well
And a bolt of electricity
But we could still support each other
All we gotta do is avoid each other

Nothing wrong when a song ends in the minor key

IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED
Leonard Cohen, ‘New Skin for the Old Ceremony’, 1974

You were the promise at dawn
I was the morning after
You were Jesus Christ my Lord
I was the money lender

You were the sensitive woman
I was the very reverend Freud
You were the manual orgasm
I was the dirty little boy

And is this what you wanted
To live in a house that is haunted
By the ghost of you and me

You were Marlon Brando
I was Steve McQueen
You were K.Y. Jelly
I was Vaseline

You were the father of modern medicine
I was Mr. Clean
You where the whore and the beast of Babylon
I was Rin Tin Tin

And is this what you wanted
To live in a house that is haunted
By the ghost of you and me

You got old and wrinkled
I stayed seventeen
You lusted after so many
I lay here with one

You defied your solitude
I came through alone
You said you could never love me
I undid your gown

And is this what you wanted
To live in a house that is haunted
By the ghost of you and me

SLEEP TO DREAM
Fiona Apple, ‘Tidal’, 1996

I tell you how I feel but you don’t care
I say tell me the truth but you don’ t dare
You say love is a hell you cannot bear
And I say gimme mine back and then go there for all I care

I got my feet on the ground and I don’t go to sleep to dream
You got your head in the clouds and you’re not all what you seem
This mind, this body, and this voice cannot be stifled by your deviant ways
So don’t forget what I told you, don’t come around, I got my own hell to raise

I have never been so insulted in all my life
I could swallow the seas to wash down all this pride
First you run like a fool just to be at my side
And now you run like a fool, but you just run to hide, and I don’t abide

I got my feet on the ground and I don’t go to sleep to dream
You got your head in the clouds and you’re not all what you seem
This mind, this body, and this voice cannot be stifled by your deviant ways
So don’t forget what I told you, don’t come around, I got my own hell to raise

Don’t make it a big deal, don’t be so sensitive
We’re not playing a game anymore, you don’t have to be so defensive
Don’t you plead me your case, don’t bother to explain
Don’t even show me your face, cause it’s a crying shame
Just go back to the rock from under which you came
Take the sorrow you gave and all the stakes you claim
And don’t forget the blame

I got my feet on the ground, and I don’t go to sleep to dream
You got your head in the clouds, and you’re not at all what you seem
This mind, this body, and this voice cannot be stifled by your deviant ways
So don’t forget what I told you, don’t come around, I got my own hell to raise

TWIST IN MY SOBRIETY
Tanita Tikaram, ‘Ancient Heart’, 1988

All God’s children need travelling shoes
Drive your problems from here
All good people read good books
Now your conscience is clear
I hear you talk girl
Now your conscience is clear

In the morning when I wipe my brow
Wipe the miles away
I like to think I can be so willed
And never do what you say
I’ll never hear you
And never do what you say

Look my eyes are just holograms
Look your love has drawn red from my hands
From my hands you know you’ll never be
More than twist in my sobriety

We just poked a little empty pie
For the fun that people had at night
Late at night don’t need hostility
The timid smile and pause to free

I don’t care about their different thoughts
Different thoughts are good for me
Up in arms and chaste and whole
All God’s children took their toll

Look my eyes are just holograms
Look your love has drawn red from my hands
From my hands you know you’ll never be
More than twist in my sobriety

Cup of tea, take time to think, yeah
Time to risk a life, a life, a life
Sweet and handsome, soft and porky
You pig out till you’ve seen the light
Pig out till you’ve seen the light

Half the people read the papers
Read them good and well
Pretty people, nervous people
People have got to sell
News you have to sell

Look my eyes are just holograms
Look your love has drawn red from my hands
From my hands you know you’ll never be
More than twist in my sobriety