Five years ago on April 17, Fiona Apple released her long-anticipated fifth studio album “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” to immediate critical acclaim. Pitchfork rated the album a rare 10 out of 10 (the likes of which it hadn’t assigned to a new release in a decade) and graced the record with its highly respected Best New Music credit, calling it “unbound, a wild symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece.”
Now that it has been out in the world for five years, I can honestly say no other record has ever left such a lasting impact on my consciousness. When I first heard it at 14, I was opened up to a world of melodic cacophony and incisive lyricism that I had never before known to be possible. It changed what I believed music could be and could make me feel. A line from the record’s Pitchfork review perfectly captures the thoughts I have formed about this album in the years it has echoed through my childhood bedroom, my broken wired headphones, the CD player in my car radio: “No music has ever sounded quite like it.”
Of Apple’s five studio records, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is the one that most honestly, and without hesitation, portrays who Apple seems to believe herself to be: a woman who is messy, imperfect, strange and often ridiculed, but unbridled and free. Gone is the demure, delicately moody ingénue from her debut album “Tidal,” released when she was only 18, on which she portrayed her sadness with elegance. Now, she is all grown up, and that illusion of daintiness has been shattered. “FTBC” is the artistic statement of a scorned and frazzled woman with a startling testimony of long-stifled truth to deliver.
This record is filled with sounds of unbridled emotion, from stomping to chanting to straight-up shouting to the screeching dolphin sounds at the end of opening track “I Want You to Love Me.” These outbursts frame the overall story Apple was aiming to tell, one of a liberated and frequently misunderstood woman who was demanding to be heard after years of silence. Furthermore, these instances of sonic chaos serve to highlight the quiet moments on this record which, in stark contrast, offer listeners with an auditory reprieve. Apple’s frantically varied contrast throughout the project makes its lyrical deliveries cut right to the nerve.
Though she had already been known for raw and outspoken lyricism prior to the release of “FTBC,” Apple spared no subtlety on this record, delving into the very depths of her womanhood and humanity with unrestrained honesty. This album is oftentimes jarringly unpolished and quite unflinching in its lyrical delivery.
“I won’t shut up/I won’t shut up” she declares in “Under the Table,” refusing to stifle herself any longer. She “spreads like strawberries” on “Heavy Balloon,” unable to continue holding herself back as she shouts and snarls, “I’ve been sucking it in so long/That I’m busting at the seams.”
The album’s titular track comes down to that same overarching sentiment of freedom, of breaking free from society’s expectations of what a “good” woman should be: “I grew up in the shoes they told me I could fill/Shoes that were not made for running up that hill.”
Apple offered an explanation of the song’s message to Vulture in 2020 when the record was released, saying the track is about “breaking out of whatever prison you’ve allowed yourself to live in, whether you built that prison for yourself or whether it was built around you and you just accepted it.”
A prominent through-line that runs rampant throughout this record is Apple’s complicated relationship to other women in her life. She explores the patriarchal tendency for women to blame other women for their pain rather than the men whose actions caused it on “Newspaper,” a song about her desire to bond with the current girlfriend of an ex-lover who fractured her spirit. On the song, Apple comes from a place of concern and understanding for what the new girl must be experiencing: “I too used to want him to be proud of me/And then I just wanted him to make amends.” Ultimately, she fears she will be resented: “I wonder what lies he’s told you about me/To make sure that we’ll never be friends.”
On “Ladies,” one of the record’s slower and more jazz-sounding tracks, Apple delves again into the complexities of her relationships to other women, specifically when they are complicated by the involvement of a man. “Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through,” she laments, describing a similar situation to the one in “Newspaper,” as she longs for the understanding and solidarity of an old lover’s new woman.
“This album is a lot of not letting men pit us against each other or keep us separate from each other so they can control the message,” she told Vulture about “Ladies.”
Over a frenzied and spiraling piano riff on “Shameika,” Apple reflects on her experience in middle school as a restless and strange child whose mind was always active in a way that isolated her from her peers, remembering a classmate who told her she “had potential.” Decades later, the impact this interaction had on her was profound: “Back then I didn’t know what potential meant/And Shameika wasn’t gentle and she wasn’t my friend/But she got through to me and I’ll never see her again.” Apple described this time in her life as the point where her relationships to other women became strained, and Shameika’s reassurance comforted her when fitting in with the popular girls felt like the most important thing to do.
Another standout track, “Relay,” explores the way abuse and harm are cyclical and what a struggle it can be not to seek revenge when you have been hurt so undeniably. There is fierce defiance in the way Apple chant-sings, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” a lyric she wrote when she was 15. The song dissolves from chaos into softly humming and singing a lullaby, as if she has resigned herself to being the bigger person despite the intense hurt that has been inflicted upon her.
On this album, Apple’s unique quirks and flaws are laid bare to be parsed by anyone who listens. By placing on display the most gnarled, unflattering corners of her psyche, she did anything but hold herself back; in doing so, she let the music express she was done being held down by her past or her pain.
