Lyrically Speaking: Delving into ‘Ladies’ by Fiona Apple
Few lyricists have captured womanhood in all of its glory and gore quite like Fiona Apple. For decades, the New York native has infused her art-pop creations with unflinching vulnerability, charting everything from her struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder to her middle school bullies. The culmination of her efforts came in 2020 with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, a landmark album which paired thudding percussion with a series of fierce statements for freedom. The album is impossibly consistent in quality, but ‘Ladies’ still manages to become a standout track.
As the record passes its halfway point, Apple turns her attention to broken relationships. It’s a topic that’s been well-charted not only in her own discography but across the entire history of songwriting. Still, the angle Apple takes on ‘Ladies’ is largely exempt from coverage, as she opts not to direct her feelings towards her lost lover but towards the girls who may follow in her footsteps. She attempts to build a bridge not with her former partner but with his future girlfriends, who will share so much with Apple despite never knowing her.
It can be difficult to navigate the idea of your ex moving on, but Apple does so with a newfound gentleness and a real respect for the women she addresses. “Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies,” she begins, in a refrain that will permeate the song’s entire five-minute runtime. Her delivery is lackadaisical, barely taking notice of the pulsing percussion that surrounds her, alternating between playful and solemn at will.
Her words quickly become more convoluted as she ruminates on various tricks of the light as if she knows that her resentment towards the “revolving door” of women her lover keeps turning out is misplaced. She knows that that sense of competition, that strange bitterness, is no more tangible than a mirage, but she still can’t keep her mind away from the feeling.
“Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through,” she sings. Is she suggesting that, in another life, Apple might become friends with her ex’s new lover? Or is she lamenting the fact that none of her warnings about their shared love interest will ever get through to this woman, due to their circumstance?
Apple returns to her repetition of the word “ladies”, a little more daring this time as she invites them to “take it easy, when he leaves me, please be my guest.” Her words seem at once disinterested and provocative, her phrases mirroring those a man might employ while encouraging you to calm down. She welcomes and warns all at once, her invitation to “take it easy”, could be taken either way.
But her intentions become clearer as the song progresses. She invites her partner’s new lover to explore his kitchen cupboards and bathroom cabinets, to make herself at home, to take up the space that once belonged to Apple. “There’s a dress in the closet,” she details, “Don’t get rid of it, you’d look good in it, I didn’t fit in it, it was never mine.” Her rambling tone emulates the kind of conversation you’d have with a real friend, exchanging clothes and compliments with ease, but it’s an experience she will never get to realise in real life.
“It belonged to the ex-wife of another ex of mine,” Apple continues to overshare, “she left it behind, with a note, one line, it said, ‘I don’t know if I’m coming across but I’m really trying,’ she was very kind.” Her lyrics spill into one another as if all her reservations and resentments have disappeared into thin air as she adopts the kindness of the woman who came before her. It’s cyclical, and Apple hopes to break the cycle while she can.
The flow of her words is interrupted by the mischievous declaration of, “Fruit bat, you cuter than a button, mutton-head maniac.” Apple seems to employ words that a man might use to disavow his ex – “batty,” “maniax,” and later, “insane” – but affords them a far lighter tone in these lines. But she quickly delves back into home truths in the lines that follow.
“Nobody can replace anybody else,” she sings, “So it would be a shame to make it a competition, and no love is like any other love, so it would be insane to make a comparison with you.” Her words convey facts that we all know deep down, but that are often clouded by emotion. As her declarative words cut through the strangeness of the lines that precede them, it’s impossible not to sit and listen, to take in her words and the truth that lies within them.
The song fades into a cyclical format, back through ruminations on looming effects and continued repetitions of “ladies”, as if Apple knows that, as hard as she tries, she will never be able to break that cycle. As the ex, she will never be able to forge a bond with the woman she addresses, but she can leave little comforts in the kitchen cupboards instead.
“Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through,” Apple repeats over and over as the song comes to an end, driving her point home. While she may never get through to the specific women from her own relationships, ‘Ladies’ is a cutting look at our relationships with our ex’s future lovers, an attempt to break through.
