Contineing Music Awareness Week (Fiona Apple)

Name: Fiona Apple
Occupation: Singer/Songwriter
Genre: Rock/Pop: Adult Alternative.
Contemporaries: Alanis Morissette
Followers: Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, and Sara Bareilles

"All along, I really wanted each song to be its own little world," says Fiona Apple. "Every song that I write, I feel like I'm in a different world. And with this album, because it's been such a long period of time, I didn't want everything to sound one particular way."

It's been a long and tangled road for Apple's stunning, intricate new album, Extraordinary Machine. But over the course of six years, multiple producers, business struggles, and life changes, she has maintained a clear sense of her musical vision-and returned with a collection of songs that reconfirms her place as one of the finest singer-songwriters of her generation. From the fragile music-hall lilt of the title track to the rollicking "Better Version of Me," from the fever intensity of "Not About Love" to the dreamy melancholy of "Oh Sailor," Extraordinary Machine reveals an artist with a sprawling, hard-fought range of emotions about love and identity, and with the musical palette to express them all. These are complicated songs for complicated sentiments.


The key that unlocked the project's final sessions was the arrival of producer Mike Elizondo. Best known as Dr. Dre's right-hand music man, Elizondo is also an in-demand session bassist who has played with everyone from Sheryl Crow to Ry Cooder-he had even contributed to When the Pawn.... Elizondo had already presented some rough treatments for the new songs before the leak threw things out of kilter. "When he came in and played some of these skeletal tracks," Apple says, "I remember I was so excited, I called my dad. It made me feel so inspired. And I just know when things are right-I knew, this is how it's supposed to be, and finally it can happen the way it's supposed to happen."


"I've had a surprisingly Zen feeling about this whole thing," she says. "I kind of always knew that it would work out somehow."

Here is one of Apple's Videos: Shadow Boxer.