We tend to think of Fiona Apple as a bit of a recluse, but she’s really not. It’s just that Apple likes to engage the world on her own terms, not on anybody else’s. In recent months, Apple has sent out a Happy Sunday video message to her fans once a week, and it’s appeared on her fan page Fiona Apple Rocks’ YouTube channel. Most weeks, Apple answers questions from fans. Sometimes, she comes out with a message, as when she expressed her anger and fear at the Supreme Court overturning Roe V. Wade. Yesterday, Fiona Apple sang us a song.

The song that Fiona Apple sang yesterday wasn’t one of her own. Apple has always had a healthy appreciation for old-school country music; on her 2012 tour, she covered Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe.” In her most recent video, Apple played a solo voice-and-piano cover of Charlie Rich’s “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World.” Rich was a country veteran when that song unexpectedly became a crossover #1 pop hit in 1973, four years before Fiona Apple was born. The song is sad and funny in plainspoken ways. Playing it with graceful intensity, Fiona Apple made it sound like a Fiona Apple song. Great song, great cover.

Since 2017, Fiona Apple has played her own songs for the public exactly once — a 2020 remote gig for the New Yorker Festival where she played two of her Fetch The Bolt Cutters songs for the first and (thus far) only time. So even something like this cover, presumably done just for fun, stands as a rare opportunity to see present-day Fiona Apple singing and playing piano. We should all appreciate that when we get it, since it doesn’t happen often. Below, check out Apple’s cover and the Charlie Rich original.