A couple months ago, Fiona Apple did a rare and charming interview with Vulture. It seems she’s struck up a friendship with its writer Rachel Handler because today Vulture has published another interview with Apple that serves as a quick catch-up with what Apple has been up to since September.

Most pertinent is that Apple is almost done with her new album, the follow-up to 2012’s The Idler Wheel…. “It’s really up to me. It’ll be done soon,” Apple said in the interview about the album’s progress. “It’s just I have to do artwork and stuff, and I’ve been dragging my feet a little bit. I don’t know. Sometime in a few months, I guess.”

She also says she knows what the album title will be, but isn’t saying, and that she thinks she’ll tour behind the album but doesn’t have a firm schedule yet. “It’s so scary for me, all that stuff,” she said. “I’m pushing it out of my mind. In the next two weeks, I have to have a meeting with the band about what our plans are and what’s going to work. They’re all in other bands, so they have other schedules.”

Apple also gets into Justin Bieber’s recent attempts to goose the Billboard charts to make sure his new single “Yummy” debuted at #1. (It didn’t.) Here’s what she had to say:

I’m not gonna go out there and try to do a crazy amount of promo. The climate of art and the music industry is so ridiculous. I feel terrible that anybody would want to be No. 1 as badly as Justin Bieber wants to be No. 1. He was upfront about gaming the system, and I think a lot of people do that, and I just want to be like, “Why? Why is it so important?” And I’m not gonna be, like, getting influencers to promote my shit. That’s not gonna happen.

So I feel like I’m stepping back into a business where, like — I’m not in this business. I don’t have the tools to play this game, and I don’t want to buy the tools to play this game, either. That’s what it feels like it’s become: a game. A video game, basically. Checking their scores.

[…] It’s very sad. And with YouTube going to charts … I don’t read this stuff because I’m in this business. It’s just really interesting to me. It’s the downfall of civilization. And why, why do you want to be an influencer?

A few days after the interview, she texted with Vulture about King Princess’ Mikaela Mullaney Straus, who released her debut album last year and also put out a cover of an Apple song. “My son Mikaela (King Princess) donated her royalties from her cover of “I Know” to While They Wait Fund!,” Apple said in that text. “It was used in some show called Dare Me, I think … I’m so proud of her …”

Apple also finally saw Hustlers, the movie that used Apple’s “Criminal” in a stripper dance scene. She liked it! The streams from that song let Apple donate $90,000 to the charity While The Wait. Read the full interview here.