Word: cd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shattered mirror, Fiona Apple's new album, When the Pawn Hits... (Clean Slate/Epic), glitters with reflective surfaces and sharp edges. The singer-songwriter's debut album, Tidal (1996), was a work of ingenue ingenuity, delicately designed, bright with innocence, laden with the prospect of future accomplishment. This follow-up CD is a promise kept: the 22-year-old's new compositions, angry but articulate, veering between gentle balladry and art-pop, don't need the crutch of precociousness to establish their worth. These are songs that stand on their...
...that depth is the greatest of heights/ And if you know where you stand, then you know where to land/ And if you fall it won't matter, cuz you'll know that you're right." It's not an epic poem, but it's an epic title; the CD's name has already drawn its share of critical barbs. "The title came from being made fun of," sighs Apple, "and then of course it becomes a thing I'm being made...
...songs on the album, Apple is far better at hitting her targets. When the Pawn Hits... has been artfully produced by Jon Brion, who helps give the CD a carefully ornate sound that's intimate yet rich. Lyrically, Apple is full of fury: at her past, at her lovers, at herself. In To Your Love she sings, "It's hard enough even trying to be civil to myself." In Limp she mocks, "It won't be long till you'll be/ Lying limp in your own hands." She knows there are things about her that put people she loves...
There's a sadness at the core of this CD that trails every beat like a heart murmur. At age 12, Apple says, she was raped by a stranger. Images from that attack creep across her songs, shadows angling along a wall. In Fast As You Can, she sings, "I fight him always and still." In real life, Apple says, she's happily dating filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights). But on this CD, her heart is a chunk of meat in a fridge: unloved, unlovable, freezer-burned. Violated once, she says romance races "right through" her. So she writes...
...American art song is still alive and well, judging by this lovely CD, on which a studioful of opera stars, including Renee Fleming, Sylvia McNair and Frederica von Stade, performs 26 songs by Californian Heggie, who is currently adapting Dead Man Walking for the San Francisco Opera. Heggie sets poems in English by poets old (Emily Dickinson) and new (Philip Littell) in the Samuel Barber/Ned Rorem manner--agreeably lyrical, unambiguously tonal--and his big-league cast responds with obvious relish...