The best song from each Fiona Apple album
Nobody could ever accuse Fiona Apple of being prolific. Since her 1996 debut, Tidal, she has only released four further albums. And while you could argue that with the extra time and evident care that she takes to perfect her albums before letting them out into the world, it should be expected that she wouldn’t make a bad one, what is particularly impressive is that not only has she not released a bad album yet, she also hasn’t released any bad songs, either.
She might just be the most incisive, insightful, masterful, and powerful lyricist of her era. Apple has captured the zeitgeist with songs and lyrics about the human condition, life, love, identity, gender politics, and everything that connects all of these threads. She is also one of the best singers, song interpreters, and emotional conductors.
With a shapeshifting sound which she revisits, updates, remoulds and reinvents from album to album, Apple has managed to adapt her music to her ever-changing voice over the years and explore new frontiers with her art while never sounding anything less than totally herself. With each new release, she reaches a new level of mastery over both herself and her muse, and she reaches new audiences and levels of acclaim, as well. Each album, in ways, builds on the last and can feel like it eclipses the one that came before, but then you return to her older works with fresh ears and find new treasures to get lost in, new lyrics to be bowled over by, and new phrasings to be awed by.
That each album is so complete makes it hard to choose between them—really, your preference will likely come down to how you are feeling on any particular day or which of her works you listened to last—and it makes choosing a favourite song from each album an even more difficult task. All of her songs are great because she puts a little of her own greatness into each and every one of them, but even still, some are a little greater than others.
The best song from every Fiona Apple album:
‘Never Is a Promise’ (Tidal, 1996)
Though her debut album is full of songs which would instantly establish Apple as a precocious, mercurial young talent to keep an eye on in the future, it also marked her out as one who was arriving on the scene fully formed and ready to blow you away right out of the gate. Plenty of other artists might use their debut record to get to grips with the feel of being in a studio for the first time, and to figure out who they are when they’re in one, but Apple feels like she arrived on the scene with an already established and fully realised sense of self, and like she was on a mission to let the rest of us in on exactly who that is, as well.
There are so many standout tracks on Tidal, and even on the songs, which, by comparison, are not quite as captivating as the others, but each one still comes with its own standout moments. ‘Never Is a Promise‘, though, is one of the most mesmeric demonstrations of Apple’s talent from any of her albums over the years. Her honeyed voice vacillates between sweetness and fury, wrath and forgiveness, and often in the very same syllable. Expressing herself and showing off her full vocal range throughout the song, she casually and effortlessly switches between sounding like a child, like a woman, and like an angel at times.
Underneath that beguiling and bewitching voice is her cascading piano—such a feature and focal point across the entire album, whether it’s driving, stabbing and slashing away on songs like ‘Criminal’, or else when caressing and caring on ‘The Child is Gone’—and an aching string section which feels at times wedding-ready, and alternately funereal.
‘I Know’ (When the Pawn…, 1999)
It’s an impossible task to pick a “best song” from an album as perfect as this, an album where every song could equally stake a claim as being the best on the release, and nobody could reasonably argue with you for picking one over the other. That it can be that good and yet is still not even definitively considered to be her greatest work speaks to the level of talent that she is working with and the consistent quality of her creative output.
‘Paper Bag’ is certainly the most well-known and popular pick from the album, but ‘I Know’ might just be one of the most dazzlingly mature pieces of music that Fiona Apple has ever written. It is a devastating note to close such a powerful and furious album on. A creeping, sneaking, and lurching lullaby of suffering, deceit, patience, and ultimately forgiveness, the song still stands among her finest and most powerful pieces ever.
‘Oh Well’ (Extraordinary Machine, 2005)
Is ‘Oh Well’ the best song on Extraordinary Machine, or is it the album opener and titular track ‘Extraordinary Machine’? ‘Get Him Back’? ‘O’ Sailor’? ‘Better Version of Me’, ‘Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song)’, ‘Window’, ‘Please Please Please’, ‘Red Red Red’ or ‘Not About Love’? Oh, well, it could be all of them again, couldn’t it? Once more, Apple was back after a relatively short break with her then-best album. This might just be the album which is most accessible to the casual listener, where she’s at her most melodic (despite singing the line “please, please, please, no more melodies” at one point), and was the last album before her Waits-ian change of pace which set her on a more percussive path.
Though Apple already sounded like the definitive version of herself when she first crashed onto the shores of popular culture with Tidal, and then cemented her sound with the follow-up When the Pawn…, she’d never yet sounded so self-assured and all-mighty, more all-powerful, more of the earth and as god-like as she did here on Extraordinary Machine, and especially on ‘Oh Well’. Her voice and piano here are titanic and enormous and all the rest of it, but the subtle layered backing vocals, understated brass, and hypnotic harp embellishments combine, contrast and contrive to tip it all over the edge.
You wouldn’t want to be on the wrathful, vengeful, spitting ire of lyrics like “What wasted unconditional love on somebody who doesn’t believe in the stuff” any more than you’d want to be on the dismissive end of the throwaway topper that comes just after it, “oh well”, as the storm of the song clears away.
‘Largo’ (The Idler Wheel, 2012)
Following her (then) longest gap between albums, The Idler Wheel…, opener ‘Every Single Night’ announced the new direction that Apple was moving in. Gone was the piano lead, and in was a more percussive, peculiar and rhythmically wrong-footing soundscape. ‘Daredevil’ came next and whilst the piano was back as a driving force, it too had become a piece of percussion in this new world that Apple was inhabiting. Another great change on this album from the first three is that Apple’s voice has cracked after years of raging against all those who have wronged her, and so sounds more hoarse, coarse and forceful than ever.
‘Valentine’ might be the most interesting song on the album, with incredibly sparse verses and a wildly driving chorus, whilst ‘Hot Knife’ is the most disorienting—the musical equivalent of stepping inside a carnival hall of mirrors—but it’s the closer ‘Largo’ which is the most charming, enchanting and spell-binding of all.
A love letter to the bar / music venue where Apple can most often be found singing, and to the cast of characters that can be found inside it, the song balances some of her most personal lyrics (“Handle me like family and that’ll be enough, to keep me from dying when I want to die”), some of her most inventive and hilarious rhymes (“I want to be part of the band though, and when Mr Tench is on the bench I want to be the piano”) and some of her most beautiful singing (“when over the rainbow’s too far, go to Lar, go to Lar, go to Largo”).
‘Under the Table’ (Fetch the Bolt Cutters, 2020)
The a capella intro of “I would beg to disagree but begging disagrees with me” is one of Apple’s most empowering lyrics, and can almost act as a mission statement for her whole life and career. You could say the same for the refrain from this song where she repeatedly sings “kick me under the table all you want, I won’t shut up”.
Maybe on this song more than ever, she completely folds together everything which has been great about all of her earlier albums: the unexpected melodies, the unexpected percussive elements, the powerful piano, the idiosyncratic phrasing, playfulness that is tinged with defiance and that blend of soft anger in her voice which is such a trademark, and such a standout quality of all her best work (so, of all of her work).
The song builds to such a crescendo, a cacophony, an eruption, before Apple breaks out of the wall of the sound and repeats with increasing intensity that “you can pal, but don’t you, don’t you, don’t you, don’t you shush me!” and then gets back to that opening “beg to disagree” couplet over a bowed bass-part, before finishing with a final chorus of defiance that “I won’t shut up”.
Let’s hope that she never does.
