Just before Fiona Apple played her new song "Every Single Night" on Sunday, someone from the sold-out Hollywood Palladium audience ' perhaps one of the many young women in witchy lace dresses ' screamed at her.
It was hard to make out what the fan yelled, exactly. But it was panicked and earnest, and Apple, 34, took to the microphone to reassure her. "I thought you said you were feeling bad," she said. "So I was just going to tell you not to feel so bad."
This can happen at Fiona Apple shows, as she commands one of the most devoted audiences of misfits (alongside A-list fans like Kanye West) in pop music.
Apple's music makes private pain unifying. Over four albums, including this year's minimal and beguiling "The Idler Wheel '" she's remained an inimitable voice in pop with a writing style that dips into art song and R&B, deconstructed noise and chamber music purity.
But just as importantly, people come to see her: to see Apple's knife-wound stare and willowy frame channel wells of unnamable hurt, a feeling Apple calls her "second skeleton" in "Every Single Night."
That mix of astounding musicianship and emotional bloodletting puts her in rare company. Though names like Janis Joplin or Nina Simone are evoked far too often when a female singer-songwriter howls for the rafters or tears up a piano, those comparisons seemed entirely appropriate after Apple's astonishing Palladium set.
One of the first things Apple did when she walked onstage was apologize for being almost half-an-hour late. "I don't have any good excuse, I was just nervous," she said to appreciative laughs.
Apple's biography is rife with real trauma ' she's been candid about enduring sexual assaults and alcoholism. But onstage, she loves toying with (and detonating) the stereotype that she's always one flat tire or spilled drink away from a psychic fracture.
She opened with a volley of early-album cuts, starting with a take of 1999's "Fast as You Can" arranged as a Sonic Youth-style guitar barrage, then leavened with the blues-hall vamp "Shadowboxer." Her voice still shivers with low-end vibrato, but a decade-and-a-half in the pop spotlight added a reediness that only makes her more convincing.
The environment of "Idler Wheel" is a new setting for her, with arrangements pared back to a smattering of dissonant percussion and pings (the album was produced by her longtime collaborator Charley Drayton, whose engineering skills deserve their own Grammy). Freed from the bombast of previous records, they let her songwriting speak for itself onstage, revealing a Carole King-worthy melodicist on "Anything We Want," and a raw-nerve desperation on "Daredevil."
The set was surprisingly short on cuts from "Idler Wheel" (composing about a quarter of the night), but they gave the set its breathing room and intimacy.
Of course, Apple is also very famous, and will never entirely live down moments like her teenage-lingerie-orgy video for "Criminal" and her memorably acerbic 1997 MTV Video Music Awards speech. They created her public persona of a Crazy Chick, a reductive image that she's fought, subverted and embraced in alternating measure. As she sang on "Paper Bag," she's the first to admit such ' "I know I'm a mess he don't want to clean up."
But Apple's artistry is about making that mess into a coherent story. She closed the set with a fan favorite, her burn-the-house-down wail "Not About Love." One rarely hears such flayed, twitching emotion in a venue that size. To call those shrieks "primal screams" would to undersell the calculated, controlled ways she played them for high drama. Everyone in the crowd, not just the girls in green Renaissance Faire capes, looked leveled by them.
But her rage and range are so much wider than that. For an encore, she played one song, a pristine and devastating cover of Conway Twitty's "It's Only Make Believe." It summed up the one, pure need that runs through her music, and through all the best songwriting: "My only prayer will be, some day you'll care for me, but it's only make believe."
On Sunday, it wasn't.
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august.brown@latimes.com
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