‘Get Him Back’: Fiona Apple’s moment of realisation
During the early years of the 2000s, Fiona Apple was ready to pack her whole music career in.
Having won critical plaudits with 1999’s When the Pawn…, a bout of writer’s block and a lack of creative direction cast some doubt on a third album. Yet, in 2002, friend and producer Jon Brion pushed for a new project together after having endured the pain of scoring 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love romantic comedy, watching hours of rushes featuring actor Mary Lynn Rajskub, who had recently ended their five-year relationship.
Apple agreed, and the pair planned preparations to record a provisional new studio record, telling Epic Records that there would be no deadline, met with a reluctant agreement.
Song leaks and rumours of internal label wrangling would dog Apple’s much-awaited album, the sessions taking place across six different studios and as many as nine songs rearranged and rerecorded. Despite initial anxieties from Epic as to its accessibility, Extraordinary Machine was eventually released in October 2005, having roped in hip-hop producer Mike Elizondo and The Moog Cookbook’s Brian Kehew to reshape the material originally under Brion. Critically received with glowing praise and lukewarm indifference, Apple’s fans loved the record, Extraordinary Machine going on to sell a million copies by 2012.
It appeared her past relationships would ultimately prove to offer a potent source of lyrical guidance and much-needed thematic vigour. Just as recording sessions were underway, Apple had ceased a years-long romance with Hollywood director Paul Thomas Anderson, as well as brief flings with the likes of street musician David Blaine and comedian/sexual predator Louis CK. With weighty characters to pick through, she came to the strange realisation that, perhaps, such tumultuous relationships led in dramatic fashion back to her own neurosis lurking at the centre of the psychological shrubbery maze.
“It became so apparent to me that the only common denominator in all of this awfulness is me,” she confessed in a 2006 iTunes Originals set, “I’m not saying it’s all my fault, but I have to take a look at myself and what I seek out in men. This song is a kind of bird’s-eye view of all my relationships, starting from the very first thing that went wrong, then me trying to re-live that first wrong thing and make it right. It’s a little tour.”
Such self-dissection was poured into ‘Get Him Back’, the final single issued for Extraordinary Machine. Atop Questlove’s heavy percussion and her signature piano thump, Apple takes potshots at a gallery of unnamed, hinted lovers, from the ex who “give me the gouge and he take my glee”, to the “contemptible snob” who “lived to put things in their place”. Such furiously scribbled caricatures seethe with unresolved excoriation, but never lapsing into bitterness, keeping a sharp wit and undimmed view of who might come along that will trounce them all.
“It’s very literal and autobiographical, except for the last part,” Apple furthered, “I made up the part about wanting the guy back because I wanted to end it nice”.
