Apparently one of the fringe benefits of dating a world-class filmmaker is taking advantage of his talents for your music videos. During their several years together, Paul Thomas Anderson directed half a dozen videos for Fiona Apple and every one is special.
Among my favorites are the big-band dance number he staged for the ‘Paper Bag‘ video and today’s selection, a black-and-white short for her cover of The Beatles’ ‘Across the Universe.’
The leaked version of Extraordinary Machine caused a fan outcry. People were outraged that such a fine piece of work was being denied them by a label with no ear for art. Fans picketed the studio, sent hundreds of apples in protest and started a campaign called ‘Free Fiona.’
Then Apple broke her silence. She thanked her fans for the emotional response but said shelving the album wasn’t the studio’s call, it was hers. She simply didn’t feel like the Brion-produced tracks made up the album she wanted to release. Instead she was rerecording the album with producer Mike Elizondo and it would be out later that year.
Excellent news!
According to Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan will release a “surprise” follow-up to 2006’s excellent Modern Times, to be released in late April.
The disc has the live-in-the-studio feel of Dylan’s last two studio records, 2001’s Love and Theft and 2006’s Modern Times, but with a seductive border-cafe feel (courtesy of the accordion on every track) and an emphasis on struggling-love songs. The effect — in the opening shuffle, “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” the Texas-dancehall jump of “If You Ever Go to Houston” and the waltz “This Dream of You” — is a gnarly turn on early-1970s records like New Morning and Planet Waves.
After When the Pawn… came out, Apple sort of disappeared. Then several years later, in a New York Times magazine interview, producer Jon Brion spoke in glowing terms about new tracks they’d recorded for an album to be called Extraordinary Machine. No release date was set.
Months passed and still no word on the new album. Rumors circulated that the studio wasn’t happy with the songs and refused to release it. But no word from Apple herself.
Choosing another song from When the Pawn… is both a simple and an impossible task. There are no bad choices, but how do you narrow it down to one? Today’s track, ‘The Way Things Are,’ is the first of a trio of songs that finish off the album (the closing track, ‘I Know,’ has already been featured as a Song of the Day).
One thing that’s increasingly clear after listening to a lot of Apple’s music is that she must be one hell of a difficult girlfriend. So many of her songs pause in the midst of trashing some hapless man to point the finger back at herself. She even has a song called ‘Fast As You Can’ which advises a potential beau to get the hell away from her for his own good.
