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Hello, hello, fine readers. It is I, your marginally friendly campus opinion-haver, ready to share some opinions in a public forum.

I have been entrusted with one-third of the music review privileges this semester, and I am ready to use this third of a column to spread my own agenda. Let’s go!

This week, the artist I want to force into all of your Spotify rotations is Fiona Apple.

There are a few artists to whom I inevitably and regularly turn over months at a time, and Fiona Apple is one of them.

I rarely tire of hearing her, and it always seems like I can get more out of her lyrics, her phrasing and her melodies.

While I can pinpoint each of her albums to the specific times when I first listened to them — “Idler Wheel” in April 2018, “Extraordinary Machine” in July 2018 — they are also albums that have gone through many small renaissances in my listening rotation.

One of those times happens to be right about now. So I’ve been delving back into the alternatively angry / sad / soft / tender / screaming tunes of Fiona Apple, and I’ve been feeling right along with her.

The album I played the most in recent months has been “When the Pawn…,” which has a full name longer than we can print here, derived from a poem Apple herself wrote.

That’s immediately a good sign for me: the album title is from the artist’s own poetry and consists of 89 words. That’s longer than this paragraph. And I am very into it.

The easiest way to categorize “When the Pawn…” is as an alternative album.

That’s true, to an extent, but it’s also reductive.

The first single, “Fast As You Can,” features these fascinating, understated bassoon sequences. There are sweeping, full orchestral horn moments and simple piano runs — within the same song. I’m used to percussion that slides under the more prominently pitched instrumental and vocal layers of a song, but the percussion choices on “Fast As You Can” and “To Your Love” are unusual enough to bear mentioning.

And all of this is underpinned and strung together with the poetry of Apple’s lyrics.

She’s eloquently angry throughout, raging at the invisible object of her words with a beautiful restraint and sometimes a beautiful lack of it, with a confidence that only comes through an absolute mastery of words. If you need the emotional release of listening to a fiercely angry, laser-point focused and perfectly channeled woman, Fiona Apple’s got you.

In the complete opposite emotional core of her music, “Red Red Red” from 2005’s “Extraordinary Machine” has been another one of my recent favorites.
Apple’s voice retains some of the edge that shines in her more righteous songs, but here it acquires a longing and a profound sadness as she sings, “I don’t understand about complementary colors and what they say / Side by side they both get bright / Together they both get gray.”

The song becomes a lament to the necessary distance between us, as human beings — we can never do more than try to understand each other.

This song breaks my heart in the way that makes me put it on repeat, and I do hope you’ll allow it to split yours open as well.

There are many other songs and lines to highlight, but I’ll leave you with a quick favorites list.

If you learned nothing from this series of words, please let just this sentence penetrate your brain and take a listen to these songs: “Parting Gift,” “Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song),” “To Your Love,” “Love Ridden” and “Periphery.”

Happiest (um, or angriest or most heartbroken, maybe) of listening to you.