On April 17, 2020, a cascade of tinkling keys rippled through me, and like so many I was grateful. Fiona Apple gave us the gift of her fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, just five weeks into the pandemic. Though the album was initially scheduled for a fall release, the artist decided to drop it early. Maybe the music could keep listeners company or, as she told Vulture, help “get out their feelings inside.”
Almost prophetically the album mirrored what we were experiencing in real time: interpersonal mayhem from being around one another 24/7 (“Drumset”), an anthemic banding together under crushing circumstances (“Heavy Balloon”), and the underlying sense of “Get me the hell out of here!” that snakes its way throughout the entire album (but especially so in the title track).
During those long, dark spring days, my pandemic besties’ text thread would alight with demands to take care of ourselves, inspired by the heroine who soothed our buzzed-out brains, “OKAY, FIONA ARMY! WE ARE GOING TO DO 20 PUSH-UPS TODAY!” I cooked more than I ever wanted to cook with her chanting in my ear, an ally in my resentment toward my newfound domesticity. A lifesaver when I was drowning in an endless sea of canned crushed tomatoes. And she sang to me as I careened through the sky with only a handful of other passengers on an eerily spacious commercial flight to reunite with my mother, who happened to be both gorgeous and terminally ill, for the first time in six months.
I gazed out at row after row of empty seats from behind my germ-repelling face shield, “’Cause you and I will be like a couple of cosmonauts / Except with way more gravity than when we started off,” Apple repeated. As always her words were stunningly prescient. —Joanna Solotaroff
