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1.

At the time of writing this, it is the eve of the release of Fiona Apple’s fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters. I await this album with a queasy, nervous anticipation, as if preparing for the smallest shred of disappointment. Not disappointment regarding the material itself, but largely regarding my own engagement with the material.

Am I in the right state of mind to take on a new Fiona Apple album?

I sometimes treat a first listen to an album like a catharsis-chasing ordeal. I waited a day to listen to Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia until I could get on my bike for a joy ride, hoping that it was the pop panacea that I could really bike to. I tried to set the situation so that this bike ride would remove any other distractions (besides a car striking me dead) and I could just enjoy the album. This heightened experience allowed me to escape the increasing reality of quarantined life. The album was not necessarily perfect (I did enjoy it a lot, though!), but the experience itself was my own perfect personal meet-cute with this new material.

But, with Fiona, I have this monastic desire to turn off the internet, turn off contact with anyone, and just concentrate on the album for a while, not just one long bike ride. This Fiona album is a gift of manna and I feel like I should be in a truly holy state to let its divinity take over me. I stir with a faith that she will not let me down. She has never let me down; even songs that did not immediately click with me eventually enveloped me whole.

No songs from Fetch the Bolt Cutters have been released yet. In comparison, the song, “Every Single Night,” predated Idler Wheel by two months And so, unlike virtually every album these days, there is no knowledge of the sound of the album nor is there any consensus brewing amongst the masses regarding the quality of the album. I feel that recent pop albums, such as Charli or Dedicated, lessen a large part of their impact because they release five singles from the album roughly six months prior to official release. Without anything to go off of, Bolt Cutters has an added level of purity as much as it has of mystery. And I would like to be just as pure during my first listen in order to rise to the occasion.

That being said, most of my relationship with pop culture is impure. I’m someone who enjoys to seek, consume, and take on the larger consensuses of popular media. I find it super fascinating the way that a movie, episode, song, or a Notes App apology can inspire a whole range of discourse, experiences, and, most importantly, narratives. I’ll listen to podcast episodes about movies I’ve never seen, becoming a sort of voyeuristic culture vulture in the process. I have never seen an episode of Game of Thrones, but I can tell you exactly why the final season was such a disaster, especially as it pertains to Daenerys’ arc.

I sometimes mourn that I experience culture too vicariously, but it feels unavoidable and I am proud of the scope of my awareness. Yet, there are times in which I get a bit annoyed. I remember feeling momentarily irritated that I was made aware of the critical narrative that the last two songs on Future Nostalgia are “the only bad songs on the album” before I had a chance to listen to them (I like “Good in Bed”!). So, please understand why I am so excited that my favorite musician in the world is releasing an album and all anyone can do is anticipate.

This means I can listen to Fetch the Bolt Cutters fully of my own accord. But, what’s going to happen after I emerge from that holy state of purity?

I await this album with queasy anticipation because this will be the first album released by Fiona Apple in the Age of Internet Discourse, in the age of ubiquitous takes, in a post-think piece world of democratic yet ubiquitous cultural punditry. And, on top of that, this is being released during the Age of Quarantine, where people are not going to have much to do but Fetch those Bolt Cutters. And that scares me. So many people will be talking about what is so preciously personal, even if it’s all good things! When #FionaApple was trending a few weeks ago, after the album release date was announced, I shuddered.

I have been trying to understand why I had this reaction; is it gatekeeping, is it vestiges of hipsterdom, or am I just trying to protect something? It can’t be gatekeeping because Fiona Apple, like most female artists, has never been behind any rockist-esque gate that people would fight to keep closed off. It can’t be hipsterdom because I feel like any sense of cultural superiority has been made irrelevant in this post-Tumblr dadaistic TikTok landscape.

I am protective of the Gus who first discovered Fiona Apple when he was 12 years old, after learning about the delay of her third album, Extraordinary Machine. I had recently had the gay aha moment and was slowly understanding all the calculations that being closeted would require. I was beginning to understand how all-consuming and constricting this would be in every facet of my life, and particularly in all forms of self-expression, both outwardly and inwardly. To hear the fervent outcry regarding the prevention of Fiona’s work, the blocking of her expression, resonated. And then discovering her first two albums — soft piano, low voice, propulsive percussion, and the painstaking lyricism — I felt through her the expression that I craved. I was bewildered by the freedom of her voice and could only hope that one day it would be my freedom, as well.

I am protective of the Gus, who in the true depths of a 7th grade depression, listened to “Sullen Girl” while shuffling through the middle school hallways trying to elongate a bathroom break as long as possible. I literalized the lyrics of the song, “I wander the halls along the walls And under my breath, I say to myself” and then, in unison with Fiona I softly sang, “‘I need fuel / to take flight.”” I was practicing a form of proto-campiness, a primitive bit of theatrics as if reaching out for a thread connecting me to the tools that my queer forefathers and foresisters have used for survival. A power would rush from her to me, allowing me to be okay with returning to class. It’s a little bit of magic.

I am protective of the Gus that refused to listen to the leaked Jon Brion produced version of Extraordinary Machine as a prototype of his future puritanical-listening endeavors, and then experienced pure euphoria when the official album was released. What a thrill it was to be there for a Fiona release, in the modern era! I listened to the eponymous opening track to calm me down and to chase away a tortuous closeted experience concurring with an ugly divorce. “I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine.” I considered getting a tattoo of that lyric (there’s still time!).

I am protective of the Gus who, when prompted to bring in his favorite poem in 8th grade, chose the entire 90-word title of her sophomore album, and recited it to a crowd of blank stares.

I am protective of the Gus who begged and pleaded with his two older brothers to drive him to Jones Beach in 2006 to see her live because he would not have dared to tell anyone about his love of Fiona Apple. The seats were awful, but she was wonderful.

I am protective of the Gus that made Fiona Apple the foundation of his own personal canon, containing mainly Björk, Kate Bush, Nina Simone, Joanna Newsom, Erykah Badu, Goldfrapp, and Bat For Lashes. My own private criterion. This helped bridge the gap from middle school to high school, in which my aesthetics, and thus my world, were being realized and validated. I started to let people in on this world, which was as radical as letting people in on my sexuality or anything else. And, I could not have known at the time, but this also helped me fill in the gaps when it became apparent that no new album from Fiona was coming any time soon.

I am protective of that Gus that had such unbridled glee when he was ghosted by a male cheerleader that he met at a Connecticut’s Statewide Gay/Straight Alliance Conference in 2010, because this meant some of Fiona’s lyrics could resonate with him on a practical level, rather than just an artistic one. When she sings, “Only kisses on the cheek from now on / And in a little while, I’ll only have to wave,” and “I want your warmth, but it will only make me colder / When it’s over,” I could finally truly feel those words.

To clarify, I was in the presence of this guy for a cumulative 15 minutes and it took him two days of Facebook messaging to reveal that he actually had a girlfriend. And yet, I wanted to call Fiona up and be like, “I get it! I get the emotions you sing of,” which meant the world to me, being out of the closet at that point for two loveless years. I now can fully understand her on such a deeper level! I have arrived.

I am protective of that Gus that entered college, who was a half-decade removed from the last Fiona album, and stopped relying on her music so much. I finally found the fuel to take that flight (across the country from New York to Portland, Oregon) and tried to soar on my own. The first two years were incredibly rocky and I struggled to figure out how exactly to soar.

The fourth album by Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel, was released on June 18, 2012, a few weeks after sophomore year had ended. I was also being ‘released’, in a way, because I was living “on my own” for the first time, off-campus and about 3,000 miles away from Mom. Given that there was not much else to do that summer besides test the limits of both the capabilities of my fake ID and of how little effort I could put into my summer classes, I devoured the album,

But, I did not devour it alone. My housemate, my closest friend, was right there with me. We’d roll our suitcases full of sunkissed, dirty clothes down the street to the laundromat while reciting, “Seek — me — out! Look at! look at! look at! look at me! I’m all the fishes in the sea.” Or, in response to her questioning me about what I was expecting to get out of my political science major, I’d sing, “I don’t wanna talk about, I don’t wanna talk about anything!” And with that, The Idler Wheel became scripture.

I’d bike across the Eastbank Esplanade worshiping the clinking and clanking of “Anything We Want” and I would liken boys to a “Werewolf.” I felt like I finally rose to the occasion of being a full-fledged adult for the release of Fiona’s most adult album yet. I did it! And this was before I was on Twitter for at-least 5 hours a day, so it felt like a personal joy. And yet I was sharing my joy with someone else! It felt like a revolutionary jolt of finding your people in college; I finally felt like I was soaring.

That summer, in quiet moments at night, my friend and I would be in separate rooms, and I’d lay on my mattress on the floor, and fret over the totality of independence and the unknown future. I would text from my LG enV² that I was, “Listening to ‘Valentine’ on repeat and I can’t stop crying.” And she’d text back, “Same.”

And then when we departed from that summer, as we went off to our separate semesters abroad, and she gave me a goodbye letter because she liked writing down her thoughts. I waited to read it once I was alone on the plane. The letter was nice, as always, but it contained another note that simply read the lyrics: “I root for you, I love you.” And I sobbed and sobbed as the plane took off.

But… I’m not protective of this Gus, as this Gus feels like just a continuation of the Gus that is writing this essay. After that plane ride, the second half of college fell on top of itself and spat me out into the world as a liberal arts graduate riddled with a cliché lack of direction. The ennui of post-school life hit with an unending, existential dread that was exasperated as everyone started to move away, particularly the friend that I shared the Fiona worship with. Post-college life lacks the milestones of growth that were so clear-cut, such as ‘coming out’, ‘first love’, and ‘finding your people.’ It all becomes a blur and you no longer have that fuel to take flight and so I left Portland.

And then suddenly it’s been 8 years and life gets predictable as much as it gets unnerving. I feel like I’ve aged out of the sentimentality of the Gus’s that I seek to protect. And that should be fine, right? As Fiona suggests, “Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key.” Should I feel protective of this Minor Key Gus?

When I see #FionaApple, it triggers me to think about how protective I feel of an older sense of me and not so much of the recent me. Because being protective of yourself is a form of loving yourself.

The world has changed so much since 2005. Instead of reading about Fiona Apple on LiveJournal because there were like a dozen fans protesting outside Sony Music, she’s now trending across an integrated, ubiquitous internet. It’s not my special moment, and it is not going to be as pure as I want it to be.

But does that mean my song is ending in a minor key? Though I listed moments of true strife earlier, there was a purity to the narrative. Things get messy after that, and I guess my fandom should as well. So please allow this essay to be a eulogy for the formative exploration and discovery that I underwent, both on a personal level but also as a Fiona Apple devotee.

And now we are here! As we are quarantined nationwide, I am feeling an odd combination of independence and restriction. I am “on my own” in New York City, but I am also jobless and directionless, having quit three jobs within the past year. I was getting ready to leave the city at the end of April 2020, as our lease was done. But, with the pandemic occurring, the lease was morphed into a month-to-month and I was approved for a decent amount of unemployment insurance, and so I am doing fine — perhaps “Better Than Fine.”

And so as I sit, in a proverbial purgatory, and of course, arriving without any hype or prior warning, like a lightning bolt of manna from heaven, comes a new Fiona Apple album.

What’s going to happen after I listen to this album? After writing this essay, I have made peace with the fact that there will be hot takes and narratives coming from all corners of the web. I have also made peace with the fact that I will be too tempted to check out the Internet, but hopefully not before I am able to listen to the album on its own, which may be a holy experience or it may not. These are, after all, strange times.

And, most of all, I have now made peace with the fact that I am 27 and the first time I listened to Fiona Apple was now 15 years ago and that time has changed and so have I.

So what am I eulogizing?

In those 15 years, I feel like I approached channeling the lessons learned from Fiona’s freedom of expression by striving to hit every checkpoint and reach all milestones. I wanted to materialize a life as complexly, richly, and fully as the way life sounds in her songs. And, I think, when the milestones became less magical, so did life.

And so now I must strive to create a space for loving and protecting that Gus of the past 8 years, of that Gus between albums. I think writing this essay is a great first step in achieving this. I felt a little bit of magic when I did the math and realized that I am now the same age of 27 that Fiona was when she released Machine.

Am I picking up some form of baton?

I have wanted to write freely for the past 5 years since graduating college, and I’ve been wanting to write about music and my love for Fiona Apple for over 10 years now. Something about writing this felt too sincere, it felt like removing myself from my voyeuristic culture vulture stance and entering the ring.

Perhaps, channeling and honoring Fiona now can take the form materializing my own self-expression and fetching my own damn bolt cutters. And I no longer care about not knowing what’s going to happen after that. Pretty extraordinary, right?

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