Brief Moments of Honesty from Otherwise Dishonest People

            Your band sucks. Even through cell phone speakers, barely audible in a crowded bar, she realizes this truth, but her mouth is bound by courtesy. Your band is fucking terrible. It’s all she can think, anticipating the moment when the timer on his iPhone playlist reaches 0:00. She no longer notices the smell of sweat, the distressing and dank atmosphere of her surroundings, the heat, the discomfort of the wooden stool beneath her. All other senses are overridden by the noise, the clamor of countless other conversations around her and the I-IV-V chord progression playing faintly underneath them. Is he bobbing his head to his own song? He can’t be …
            “What do you think”

            “What do I think?”

            “Of the song?”

            “I can’t really hear it.”

            “Do you like it?”

            “It’s good.”       

Fiona Apple at the Winstar: this is not about hash

"Fiona Apple doesn't perform her songs -- they escape. "

That is the prevailing rhetoric surrounding Fiona Apple's current Idler Wheel tour, recent arrest notwithstanding. And it's a fitting sentiment, one that Apple perpetuates in each of her performances thus far, and it's a telling one, too, that she has reached a point as a performer that critics are no longer labeling her performance as performances. No, they go to the top shelf of their vocabulary when Fiona comes through town. But it fits. She is an enigma, disappearing from the scene and emerging seven years later with a heart-wrenching album of raw and intimate songs.  

When she stands behind the mic, you can hear the intensity in her voice, see it in her thin body as pounds at her chest during a verse, feel it as she crouches down on the stage, contemplating or what-have-you during a interlude. Her fingers fly and bounce atop the keys of the piano.

Image Courtesy of Pegasus News