Always on the run fiona apple biography

When Fiona Apple pulls into a new town – some place where she has never been before but where tonight there is a theater with her name on, and an audience waiting to suck in her pushy, poignant songs of disaffection and self-reliance – she takes a peculiar pleasure in picking up a copy of the local newspaper and reading its short, skewed, action-packed summary of her life and credentials. “Fiona, who said something bad at the MTV awards,” she offers, by way of example, “who was in therapy as a child, who was ugly but now is pretty . . . “

Something like that. Maybe more: Fiona, who has sold 2 million copies of her “Tidal” album, whose “Criminal” video shows her flouncing in her underwear, who told the MTV audience, “This world is bullshit,” who was raped at the age of 12, who is crazy keen about Maya Angelou, who was discovered when a friend of hers baby-sat for a music publicist and passed on a tape, who told a magazine, “I’m going to do good things, help people, and then I’m going to die,” who is too thin, whose parents split up when she was young, who never smiles, who is only 20 and dates magician David Blaine, whose life was ruined when they started calling her “Dog” at school . . .

Much of this is true. Some is sort of true. Some is false. But in the busy, greedy, impatient ’90s, we become whatever may be written about us in one or two perky paragraphs, and hers might lead one to believe that Fiona Apple is either a precocious, calculating prodigy or an unbalanced, ungrateful freak. That is the great sucker punch of modern celebrity: It draws in the Fiona Apples of this world with that most wonderful of all promises – to be understood – and yet humans are still to invent a quicker, more-efficient method of being misunderstood by the greatest possible number of people than Becoming Famous in America. F

Hallman, an affable, silver-haired lesbian, grew up poor in Appalachia; after studying engineering at Stanford, she worked in the California energy industry. In the mid-aughts, she moved to L.A. to try filmmaking, getting some small credits. Each woman called their relationship balanced—they split expenses, they said—but Hallman’s role displaced, to some degree, the one Apple’s brother had played. In addition, Hallman sat in on our interviews and at recording sessions; she often took videos, posting them online. They slept on the daybeds in the living room. Apple had made it clear that anyone who questioned her friend’s presence would get cut out. Hallman described their dynamic as like a “Boston marriage—but in the way that outsiders had imagined Boston marriages to be.”

Hallman said that she hadn’t recognized Apple when they met. Initially, she’d mistaken the singer for someone younger, just another Venice Beach music hopeful in danger of being exploited: “I felt relieved when she said she had a boyfriend in the Hills, to take care of her.”

“Oh, my God, you were one of them! ” Apple said, laughing.

After my July visit, Apple began to text me. She sent a recording of a song that she’d heard in a dream, then a recording describing the dream. She texted about watching “8 Mile”—“doing the nothing that comes before my little concentrated spurt of work”—and about reading a brain study about rappers that made her wonder where her brain “lit up” when she sang. “I’m hoping that I develop that ability to let my medial prefrontal cortex blow out the lights around it!” she joked. Occasionally, she sent a screenshot of a text from someone else, seeking my interpretation (a tendency that convinced me she likely did the same with my texts).

In a video sent in August, she beamed, thrilled about new mixes that she’d been struggling to “elevate.” “I always think of myself as a half-ass person, but, if I half-assed it, it still sounds really good.” She added that she’d wh

Actually, there are some chords I put into “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” but I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to do C-A-G-E-D, “caged.” I had the title of the album for like three years, but when I wrote the song, it kind of acted out the fetching of the bolt cutters for me, and the cutting of the bolts. So I think that, for that reason, it feels like it’s me. It’s where I was born.

What were you releasing yourself from?

A lot of it is about allowing somebody to have power over you. It’s hard to talk about. I started reading about how things that happened to you many, many years ago can take a long time to process, especially if you’ve been numbing yourself for a long time. I didn’t know that before. I thought I was just keeping myself trapped in feelings and flashbacks and nightmares—feeling trapped by the way somebody tells you who you are, getting isolated with somebody who doesn’t have your best interests at heart. And they manipulate you, and they lie to you. When you love somebody, you believe them when they tell you who you are.

People get their hooks in you by being very loving at first. And you tell them about your weaknesses and your insecurities, and they ended up using it as ammunition against you. They use it to make you feel small so that you don’t leave. And even when you do leave, years later you still believe the things they said about you. I needed to stop believing that stuff. And it’s really hard sometimes. When you’re young, people can really get into your brain. I was also mad at myself for trying to make peace and be friends and ingratiate myself to someone, because I was afraid of them, and because I wanted them to stop.

There’s always little messages in my songs—to a person here, a person there. If I try to talk to somebody about something, and they will not talk to me, what I have to say will end up in a song. It will be veiled in certain ways. But there will be something that only that person will understand.

How deep rooted is a