Princess Fiona Rules Psycho Kingdom:


For Morphizm.com

Fiona Apple is off her rocker.

The diminutive, fairy-like songstress with a glow reminiscent of a nuclear holocaust entertained 6,000 of her biggest fans in a hometown reunion of sorts at the award-winning Greek Theatre in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park on June 24. The Sony Music recording artists followed a strong if not inspiring opening performance by Damien Rice, who was brought to limelight with his 2004 song “The Blower’s Daughter” from the “Closer” soundtrack.

Apple – the daughter of former singer Diane McAfee and actor Brandon Maggert, who is best known for Sesame Street and his 1970 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in “Applause” – is an enigma to the tee. She did little to disappoint as she growled and twirled her way through nearly two hours of her greatest hits book-ended by selections from her latest album, “Extraordinary Me,” truly a labor of love for the 5-foot, 2-inch drama queen.

And that’s said with the utmost respect and admiration, and a little bit of repartee, as Apple is not yet 29 and has recorded but three albums spaced out over a decade.

Gloriously and calculatedly insane, Apple is a muse for the lovelorn and the forlorn, singing from the heart on wantonness, regret, and most importantly self-discovery and acceptance.

“I make a fuss about a little thing. The rhyme is losing to the riddling,” she laments on “A Better Version of Me” from Extraordinary, before realizing, “I am likely to miss the main event if I stop to cry and complain again, so I will keep a deliberate pace. Let the damn breeze dry my face. Ooh mister, wait until you see what I plan to be.”

And, ooh mister, what a blueprint.

Pain and frustration oozed from Apple’s lyrics as she battled angel and demon in a freakish multiple-personality dance. It’s truly amazing how a waifish, truly stunning woman, in that surprisingly sexy Haight-Ashbury way, can at one moment spit forth such guttural tones and the next conjure and weave lofty melodies that pierce the heart and tear the eye, all while swaying in front of the crowd in a house dress that reveals her shadowy curvature. She truly suffers for her sins, and those imbibed inside her, while hinting at her perfectly kookie genius.

"Please please please, no more melodies," she sang on Extraorindary's aptly-named "Please Please Please." "They lack impact, they're petty. They've been made up already"

After all, the New York-born siren was already in psychotherapy at age 11. By 13 she was “recovering” from sexual assault, and she was soon on her way to a Los Angeles finishing school where the experiences and no doubt her insanity bubbled up in song. To this day a tattoo adorns her back with the letters “fhw” for “Fiona has wings,” which, as the story goes, was born from a childhood dream where she would exclaim the phrase as while rising into mid-air above her schoolmates.

The resulting pain and withdrawal electrifies her prose amid her piano staccato like a hammer to unyielding concrete. But just as quickly, she rebounds from furious drama queen, complete with horrific Grateful Dead inspired carnie dance moves, and elevates to awe-inspiring melodic talent beyond compare.

Bottom line is, Apple makes herself vulnerable to her fans, and herself, and in doing so proves the immense talent that elevated her to superstar status at 19 following her debut “Tidal” and its anthemic heartbreak tale “Shadow Boxer.” She sang that at the Greek, but, strangely, her heart did not seem into the performance. She almost seemed pissed off, as if she was a girl forced to clean her room before she would be allowed to ride her pony into town.

But, as the night progressed, she gained confidence – and her proper mic level for the cavernous amphitheater – like on the sultry “Slow Like Honey,” bearing her soul more softly, and then again on Tidal’s “Sullen Girl,” rearranged for a classical guitar so masterly performed by pre-opening act Dave Garza, then picking her spots to jack it up a notch and hit the audience over the head with her sexually-charged “Criminal” and the aptly frenetic “Fast as You Can” off her 1999 disc “From the Pawn.” Then she switch-footed the set by testing her jazz legs with Extraordinary’s “Red Red Red” and “Oh Well.”

At one point, and I’m paraphrasing here, Apple told her fans, “I don’t eat meat, but if I did, I think I would have to go on killing it for days,” before admitting the doozy made little sense to anyone but the people inside her own head.

Fiona Apple is entirely individualistic at the same time eerily communal, sharing what’s in her heart and on her mind at a moment’s notice. And her fans love her for it.

MySpaced Out:


Infrequently of late do I have the chance to 'Net surf and instill a chuckle in my otherwise bane existence. That mostly has to do with my crazy work schedule, as working 3 billion and two hours a week tends to limit one's free time. And free time is important, cathartic even.

Take the Internet. It, after all, provides that rare form of comic relief which, on one hand, strikes a funny nerve that makes you laugh so much you cry at the audacity of society, and at the same time feeds the crack that forces you to incessantly tongue the sore, raw spot until in gangrenous revelry. One doesn't need to leave the house to live. Need to eat? Click ... online groceries. Want entertainment? Click ... Netflix. And if that doesn't do it for you, email me and I'll send my list that's sure to bring hours of pleasure.

I digress.

It's all a big reality game.

Take MySpace, for instance.

I joined the "community" for much the same reason as most: to promote my band. OK, so I like to stretch the truth. Yes, I was in a band at the time, and my guitarist and I concocted a plan to set up profiles to meet girls, all under the guise of luring them to our shows. Hey, every band needs its fan base.

Anyway, I was also dating a girl at the time who was as online whorish as they come, and she helped pull me into this cyber abyss. "Everyone's doing it," she said, as if I needed to only understand the sheep's logic for WHY he plunged over the side of the cliff.

Little to my knowlege she and one of her "friends" was getting all too friendly, and soon I would be a big fat single guy. Now I really needed this thing.

Suddenly, with intentions germane to any great artist, I found literally millions of girls at my fingertips, all conveniently between the ages of 20 and 22. And of course they were all hot. If I didn't know better, I'd hypothesize that some secret sex industry PR firm was working around the clock to post profiles of cutest girls imagineable, all of which "totally love baseball and beer," enjoy spending free time shopping for Tool tickets to surprise their boyfriend and like to play Jeff Buckley on their '67 Fender Stratocaster.

All I had to do was come armed with a show flyer and I, too, could form a harem of thousand upon thousands of "friends." Of course, these "friends" would translate into headcount at the ticketbooth, you know at my shows. Each "friend" would undoubtedly bring three or four friends with her. OK, so I had no shows to play. Minor details. I had my friends, and the numbers were slowly but surely growing. I even met a couple in person.

And ... they somehow looked nothing like their profile. Not that I'm a male pig or anything, OK, so my track record is not proven, but isn't the camera supposed to put on an extra 15 pounds? How come all the girls I was meeting looked skinnier in their photos.

I sooned learned a very valuable lesson: all is not what it appears, especially online.

My point here is that pop culture has gone and tinkered with another great invention, and totally destroyed it. Myspace and sites like it do the devil's work. They lure us away from thoughtful free enterprise, like going to bars, getting shit-faced and hooking up with a parking meter the old fashioned way. It hypnotizes us, dick in one hand, mouse in the other, scrolling through an endless directory, searching, searching, seaching. For what I never discovered.

The gist: well, the grass is always greener. Didn't your grandma tell you that?

Don't get me wrong. There's plenty that's great about the Internet. Never have I so readily used a dictionary in my life as I do www.m-w.com (blatant product placement). I'm also a lot better with my personal finances. Ah, thank you online banking. I can even pay bills without getting off my pasty white ass to secrete the billfold from my back pocket. Oh, and I can find guitar tabs to virtually every song dating back to 450 B.C.

Who said the Internet isn't a great thing?