Fiona Apple Talks New Album, Hustlers, & More In Rare Interview
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In what seems like a bizarre dream but is in fact real life, Vulture has just published a rare interview with Fiona Apple, the musician’s first interview with the press in years. Apparently, Apple reached out “from a nondescript Hotmail address” to Vulture writer Rachel Handler after noticing that she called out a Variety video on Twitter that was seemingly edited to say that Apple was donating her “Criminal” royalties to “the movie” it was recently included in (Hustlers) instead of an organization that aids refugees, which Apple herself announced in a statement a few months back.
The first part of the interview is largely about that incident, but Apple then goes on to talk about pretty much everything, first going deeper into the usage of “Criminal” during a strip scene in Hustlers (Apple still hasn’t seen the movie: “If I were a person who actually left my house, I’d go.”), and then talking about the new album that she’s making progress on, the follow-up to 2012’s The Idler Wheel…, which she says could be out next year: “I was supposed to be done a million years ago. And I go off and I take too long making stuff. I’m hoping for early 2020. I think.” She continues:
I worry a lot about what it’s gonna be like when I actually have to put out an album and go out there. I think I’m getting close to finishing. While I’m doing it, I have to put the rest of it out of my mind. It’s just fun. It’s just me making stuff, on my own time, and then not making stuff for years, and then starting to make stuff. It’s just around this time when things are starting to shape up with the album and everything is getting toward the finish line — that’s when I start to get a little concerned for myself. I’ll be okay, I just know that it’s not going to be all enjoyable. Every time I go out on a photo shoot, I think, This is different from seven years ago. I don’t feel like this anymore.
Elsewhere, she says that the album is “just me and the band,” continuing: The more control you have over something, the more it’s your baby, the more you care about it, the more it feels like an accomplishment. The last record and this record feel more like mine than the other records. You know? Not that I don’t feel like the other records are mine.”
Apple also addresses a lot of ephemera from her recent career that she hasn’t talked about before, including denying Panic! At The Disco the rights to sample her song “Every Single Night” and what happened to her Grammy, which at one point she said she didn’t know where it was:
I gave it to this school, and I have to get it sent back. For the longest time it was at somebody’s house and they wouldn’t give it back to me, and I said I was going to give it to my grandmother, but I was really going to donate it to a school so they could auction it off. But it turns out you can’t auction it off. So now it’s in this office in this school, and I haven’t gotten around to writing them to get it back.
There’s a lot of gems in the interview, and you can and should read the whole thing here.