On April 17, 2020, a cascade of tinkling keys rippled via me, and like so many I used to be grateful. Fiona Apple gave us the reward of her fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, simply 5 weeks into the pandemic. Although the album was initially scheduled for a fall launch, the artist determined to drop it early. Perhaps the music might maintain listeners firm or, as she informed Vulture, assist “get out their emotions inside.”
Nearly prophetically the album mirrored what we have been experiencing in actual time: interpersonal mayhem from being round each other 24/7 (“Drumset”), an anthemic banding collectively beneath crushing circumstances (“Heavy Balloon”), and the underlying sense of “Get me the hell out of right here!” that snakes its means all through the whole album (however particularly so within the title monitor).
Throughout these lengthy, darkish spring days, my pandemic besties’ textual content thread would alight with calls for to care for ourselves, impressed by the heroine who soothed our buzzed-out brains, “OKAY, FIONA ARMY! WE ARE GOING TO DO 20 PUSH-UPS TODAY!” I cooked greater than I ever needed to prepare dinner together with her chanting in my ear, an ally in my resentment towards my newfound domesticity. A lifesaver once I was drowning in an infinite sea of canned crushed tomatoes. And she or he sang to me as I careened via the sky with solely a handful of different passengers on an eerily spacious business flight to reunite with my mom, who occurred to be each beautiful and terminally ailing, for the primary time in six months.
I gazed out at row after row of empty seats from behind my germ-repelling face protect, “’Trigger you and I shall be like a few cosmonauts / Besides with far more gravity than once we began off,” Apple repeated. As all the time her phrases have been stunningly prescient. —Joanna Solotaroff
