Sold Date: August 4, 2017
Start Date: July 19, 2017
Final Price: $48.00 (USD)
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Fiona Apple’s 1996 debut album Tidal's first-ever vinyl release. The 2xLP, 180g black vinyl was remastered from original analog tapes by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound, and comes with a gatefold jacket, 12-page lyric booklet, and a 12x12 art print. Plenty of us dismissed Apple from the outset and missed out on sentiments like that, but plenty more didn’t. Tidal sold three million copies in the United States alone, and it’s likely that Apple’s songs got thousands of kids — including Apple herself, possibly — through difficult times. Because of Alanis Morissette and the other Lilith Fair artists, she had an open pop lane for songs like that to resonate with people. But those songs resonated way beyond their in-the-moment context. Apple didn’t come from the same coffeehouse-folk tradition as many of her contemporaries. She didn’t come from any tradition, really, though it was obvious that she had strong feelings about torch-song jazz. Musically, she was closer to Portishead than to Paula Cole. She was capable of great beauty, and I can imagine a song like “Never Is A Promise” being a hit for an Adele type today. But there was also a heavy, swirling darkness to those songs. Jon Brion didn’t produce the album — that job went to Sony exec Andrew Slater — but he did play tons of instruments on it. And Apple’s own piano, fluid but hammering, gave her songs a graceful sophistication and a cinematic sweep that her peers just couldn’t approach.
She also sang about big feelings in convincing ways. She could sing about typical teenage situations — on “The First Taste,” for instance, it was waiting for some goof to stop fucking around and finally kiss her — like they were just apocalyptically important. But she also went to darker places. There were sexual power-dynamics at work, both in the songs and in the ways she presented them. The legend goes that Apple wrote “Criminal” in 45 minutes after someone from her label told her she needed a single, and it remains her biggest, most iconic song now. Its combination of guilt and regret and predatory power was a completely new thing; I’ve still never heard anyone match it. And her voice was something different, too: a deep baritone rumble that could float but could also turn into a gut-scrape roar.
Tidal was a beginning, of course. She’d get better on successive albums. She’d branch out into different, weirder, more adventurous musical ideas, and she’d follow her own voice down different rabbit holes. The slick, lustrous, almost adult-contempo Tidal production would give way to the free-roaming skitter that Jon Brion brought to sophomore album When The Pawn… She’d go quiet for years at a time, and while she’d never again reach the commercial success of Tidal, she’d attain full-on cult status instead. Every time I’ve seen her live in the past decade or so, people have been practically swooning. That version of Apple wasn’t quite there on Tidal, but it’s still a powerful, resonant album, and if you ever dismissed it, for any reason, you should do yourself a favor and rediscover it. It might make this world a little less bullshit.