"my strength is in my honesty"
Fiona Apple on Sessions at West 54th - May 30, 1998

Fiona's appearance on Sessions at West 54th, this being the first time I've seen it, really stood out to me.  She seemed to really enjoy performing, and everything was done rather inteligently.  I really liked it.  She performed Sleep to Dream(which you can get a clip of at the Sessions at West 54th website's Fiona section), Shadowboxer, Criminal, and Never is a Promise.  It was all rather remarkable.  I've transcribed it below: you can read the interview in it's entirety at the Sessions at West 54th website.

I- Interviewer, F-Fiona

First she comes onstage wearing apparently some cut-off shorts and a black shirt, all rather deconstructed looking, all black.  She performs and excellent Sleep to Dream, with some very interesting guitar towards the end.  Then they cut to the interview:

I - The story about how you ran into Andrew Slater is pretty remarkable.

F - Yeah.  I would say so.  And the whole thing about it is that I don't think I would've been here had it happened any other way or had it taken any longer than it did.  I had this incredibly strong intuition, or I just felt, I told my sister that I heard a voice to go to California and make a demo tape, because all of a sudden this clarity came to me.  Because this is the time in my life when I'm supposed to have one of those identity crisises that like I'm supposed to have at my age, like what am I gonna do with my life and everything and all of a sudden, I realized you shouldn't really worry about it, just have the clarity and have the vision to see which doors are opening for you and follow it that way and for some reason it just felt like California meant to me like show business, California meant go out there and record and do your music thing because that's what my dad always wanted me to do.  I was like ok, and I just felt it like a voice and I was like, "oh I think I'll do this."  Went to California, finished school in two months, made my demo tape, my dad said we're going to have to send copies out all over the place, we're going to have to hand them out on the street, you know, force them on-

I - he was happy with it?

F - well no I mean but he was saying, he was happy with it, but he was saying it was going to take, years, I was going to meet five or six managers before I found the one that I wanted to stay with, that I was going to send it to every A&R guy on the planet, and wait.  I really was not going to do that, and I wasn't going to play clubs, and I'm in complete awe of the bands that do that for years and years, waiting for a record deal, so we made up our first batch of tapes, 78 tapes, and I thought that was a ridiculous amount of tapes to make because I just wasn't willing to talk to that many people about my music.

I - so you still have the tapes?

F - I still have 77 of them, becasue I gave one to my freind and she was babysitting for Katherine Shanker(??) who is a publicist and she gave it to her and Kathy had a party, and Andy went to the party and called me up, so instead of going back to L.A. and starting to hand out the rest of my 77 tapes, I went to LA and met andy, decided on the first day that I loved him he was great and we could work together, and that was it.

I - you said that if it happened any other way, you wouldn't be here tonight.

F - yeah, I wouldn't, because I wouldn't have stuck it out for a long time.  I'm so tired of trying to say things to people and having them not listen that I, that's a lot of the reason why a lot of people think that I'm depressed, or sullen, or shy, because I just simply will not talk to you unless I think that you're listening to me, I just simply won't, I can't, so if I had to go and run around, I just wouldn't do that, if I had to go around and solicit all my- I just couldn't do it, because I'd rather be in my own head than have to deal with people, you know, not taking me seriously anymore.

Fiona plays Shadowboxer.  She really got into this song.  It was amazing to watch - it almost seemed to hurt at times.  She was really into it.  Then she got under the piano and creeped out to the mic to sing Criminal, which was very intense, there was a lot of energy in it.

I - Looking back at this point do you think you would prefer it had unfolded different in a way?

F - no, because my strength is in my honesty, and I think it's only right that I go through things in an intense way, so that when I express that, and I will, that there's things to be expressed.  If I go through things, you know there's a lot of people going through a lot of stuff in this world and not saying anything about it and instead, and not getting up when they have an opportunity to speak to a lot of people, and not saying anything about that to actually help the people that are watching, they're just getting up there and going "oh...  you know..."

I - Coasting through life.

F - Like that and so, you know, I'm not going to be that kind of person.  So when I go through this stuff, yeah, I'm not going to say that this isn't tough and that I don't hate it sometimes, this is terribly hard to adjust to and I've thought many times that it wasn't worth it, but the fact is that I did adjust to it and that proves to me that I can do anything.

Everything is so well groomed in the media, I just think it should be more aflictive(??) of what real life is really like, you know?  I don't want all of my mistakes to be edited out of my public, you know, package thing.  I want my mistakes to be in there because that's who I am and I'm only as cool as I am because of the mistakes I've made and how I've handled them, and nobody is just one thing all the time, nobody's cool all the time, and nobody's smart all the time.  So this is me and this is all of me, every part of me.

Fiona performs Never is a Promise, really excellent, very moving, this is how she introduces it: "this is a song basically about just the absurdity of hopelessness because >laughs< there's just no need for hopelessness and it's just so easy to fall into and I've fallen into it so much, I mean I could forget about it two seconds from now and I could be hopeless two seconds from now and that's what's ridiculous about it, but anyway, I wrote this when I was fifteen and I felt like no one was ever going to listen to me and there was no chance.  but never say never, so, this is called Never is a Promise."

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