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A few hours after her morning stroll, Apple, 28, sits in the lounge of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, her long hair damp from a shower and curled into a loose bun. Her eyes are so startlingly big and blue that a direct gaze almost feels accusatory. She's still in her trench coat, which she wears over a turquoise T-shirt and long black skirt. She made the mistake of having some coffee earlier and is a little shaky from the caffeine. She used to take medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder, but over the years, she's gotten better at handling stress. ''As frazzled and tired and kind of jittery as I am right now,'' she says with a smile, looking down at a trembling hand, ''I'm actually doing great and I'm very happy.''

After six years of silence, Fiona Apple finally reveals the real reason her mystery-shrouded ''Extraordinary Machine'' took so long By Karen Valby EW | Sep 23, 2005

Fiona Apple knows how to take care of herself. She has to go for a long walk every day or she gets a little crazy. So on a recent morning in New York City, she woke up at 4:30, put on sneakers and a navy blue trench coat, and left her midtown hotel. She moved slowly with her hands stuffed in her pockets, listening to her new iPod on shuffle, and the music in her ears made her feel like she was wandering through a movie.

She walked through Central Park just before sunrise, the light soft and gauzy, with Elliott Smith singing 'In the Lost and Found.' She walked to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where as a child she sang in Christmas pageants. She walked all the way up by Columbia University to her mother's apartment building, where Apple was raped in a hallway by a stranger when she was 12 years old. She kept walking and eventually found herself in front of the Dwight School on 89th Street, where she once worked as a receptionist while attending night school. Here her iPod randomly settled on 'Pale September,' a ballad from Apple's first CD, 1996's aggressively confessional Tidal. Normally she freaks out and skips her own songs. But today, looking at the place where as a teen she jotted down some exquisite lyrics that jump-started a multiplatinum career, she forced herself to listen.

All these years later, and back to the beginning. Which is really the only place to start a story about the mercurial artist, who vanished from the music scene after the critically adored 1999 album When the Pawn... and told herself she'd never return. Six years later, her new record, Extraordinary Machine, which was supposedly shelved by her label, which in its early stages was mysteriously leaked to the Web, which inspired elaborate conspiracy theories and a fan-driven campaign to 'Free Fiona,' is coming out. And Fiona Apple is finally ready to set the record straight about why she went away, and why it was such a battle coming back.

A few hours after her morning stroll, Apple, 28, sits in the lounge of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, her long hair damp from a shower and curled into a loose bun. Her eyes are so startlingly big and blue that a direct gaze almost feels accusatory. She's still in her trench coat, which she wears over a turquoise T-shirt and long black skirt. She made the mistake of having some coffee earlier and is a little shaky from the caffeine. She used to take medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder, but over the years, she's gotten better at handling stress. 'As frazzled and tired and kind of jittery as I am right now,' she says with a smile, looking down at a trembling hand, 'I'm actually doing great and I'm very happy.'

She knows what people assume about her: 'That I'm crazy. Annoying. Bratty. Sullen. All the things that I definitely am sometimes.' (During a two-hour conversation, she's also funny, frank, and self-aware.) She blames these perceptions on the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, where she was named Best New Artist. Fresh off her breakthrough 'Criminal' video, in which she crawled moodily around in her underwear, Apple delivered an acceptance speech full of regret and disgust, telling the stunned room that 'this world is bullshit!'

'I felt like it wasn't my music that had gotten me there,' she says today, 'and I felt very resentful of that and of myself for that. It had been so important to me to get to this point, to be in this crowd, and once I got there I saw it wasn't anything I could really feel proud of. I thought that even if I can't articulate what I'm feeling, if I don't get up and say what's on my mind then I never will. So when I finished I felt great. But you should have seen the cold shoulders I got backstage. It was the moment where I realized that I was in control and could say whatever I wanted to. That is not something that makes people you work with very comfortable.'

Another often-mentioned low point is Apple's public meltdown at New York's Roseland Ballroom during a February 2000 stop on her When the Pawn... tour. Complaining that she couldn't hear herself, she fled the stage mid-show in hysterical tears, and never returned. (At a makeup concert several months later, Apple apologized to the audience, saying 'You said you wanted me to be self-confessional; I thought you said selfish and unprofessional.')

Sick of the public life ('I was cast in the crazy role and I was perfect for it'), heartbroken by how misunderstood she felt ('to feel hated is really, really awful'), Apple went back to Los Angeles and dropped out of the spotlight. When she and her boyfriend of three years, Magnolia director Paul Thomas Anderson, broke up in 2001, Apple moved out of his place into a house in Venice Beach. Other than a twin mattress in the living room that served as both bed and sofa, three dog pillows for her stray pit-bull mix Janet, a boom-box radio, and a TV monitor for videos, she left her house unfurnished for nearly two years. Tell her this sounds incredibly sad and lonely, and she says it wasn't really. 'I had so many other people's voices in my head that I just needed to take away everything.'

She took walks, she read plays, and she watched movies. But mostly Apple just sat in silence out on her lawn. 'You can call it a very long-drawn-out day-to-day meditation,' she says. 'I went through a period where I had a razor blade and was carving things out of wood. I would just do that all day, sitting there and thinking.' (Ask Apple if she was high as a kite out there on the grass and she laughs and says no. She admits to a short drug phase, when she smoked pot every day, but that was before this.) Friends needled her, saying she was wasting time and needed to get back to songwriting. 'And I would be like, 'No, this is exactly what I need to be doing right now.' I just had to sit there and figure the f--- out who I was. I didn't have an appetite for music in any way.'

Apple was ready to retire. But Jon Brion, who played many of the instruments on Tidal and produced When the Pawn..., who's worked with everyone from Kanye West to Rufus Wainwright, wasn't prepared to let that happen. 'This is one of my favorite artists alive,' he says. 'She needs to be out there.' Brion would casually check in about her work when they met for their weekly Tuesday lunch at Hal's, a restaurant in Venice. 'Most of the time,' she remembers, 'it would just be as simple as 'Writin' anything?' 'Nope.'' They went on like this for a while, until Brion finally broke down in the spring of 2002 and told his friend that she simply couldn't give up on music. 'You should really, really, really, really do this,' he remembers pleading. 'You really need to do this, because most other people suck.'

Apple gathered together some pieces for songs, songs that she says she 'wouldn't have finished until I was 50 or 60,' if Brion hadn't gotten her out of the house. 'I did need a kick in the ass,' she says. The two moved into the Paramour, a 1920s Los Angeles mansion on four and a half acres of land, for a few months. She wrote and finished a bunch of songs, and they settled in to record Extraordinary Machine. And while Apple says that she's incredibly proud of the work she did there with Brion, she just wasn't happy enough with it to release it as her third album. She decided she wanted to give these songs another shot?with a different producer. 'I just wanted to explore,' she says. 'If I did this song a different way, what would it be like? It was like moving into my house again: I really didn't know what color fucking couch I wanted.'

'It's an artist's prerogative to change their mind,' says Brion (only two of his original recordings remain on the finished CD). 'It's an artist's prerogative to be unsure of themselves or of anything else. It's just not that big a deal. My concern from the get-go was that there be another Fiona Apple record. I don't need to have more records with my name on them.' So Brion introduced Apple to his friend Mike Elizondo, a producer best known for his work with Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent. Elizondo started noodling around with the songs, adding his own beats. Apple loved what she heard and wanted more. She went back to Epic and asked for the money to rerecord her album with Elizondo.

But by this time, Epic had gotten a first listen to the Paramour recordings and, according to Apple and Brion, didn't like what they heard. 'They wanted 'Criminal 2' and everybody knows it,' says Brion. 'Come on, she's 10 years older now! I told them, 'You have to look at Fiona like you look at a Thom Yorke or Bjˆrk. We're living in a time where there's a lack of really forthright artists, and the ones who are ? people really care about them and they're going to be there for them.' And [the response] was pretty much, 'If she doesn't have a single, her career's going to be over.'' (Michele Anthony, COO of Epic parent company Sony Music, insists that Apple 'is a rare and special artist who puts out albums that are bodies of work. She is not an artist where you worry about whether there is a hit single.')

According to Apple, Epic then told her that she could rerecord the album one song at a time. If the label approved a track she deemed finished, she'd get the money to record another. (A label rep denies this was ever Epic's plan but acknowledges that 'many things were likely miscommunicated to Fiona during this time period.') 'I fucking smell a rat here,' Apple remembers thinking, 'because let's say I hand something in that I'm happy with. They're going to own something that now I'm really happy with, which they can shelve if they want, or they're going to tell me, 'We don't like it this way, why don't you change this?' And that would be the death of me. No one's ever told me how to write a song before.'

Apple, who calls herself a compulsive self-doubter, waffled over whether she should work under the constraints of what she understood to be Epic's new deal. 'Should I do it? Should I not do it?' Then she came to her senses. 'I remember very clearly sitting in my house, going outside, sitting on the step, calling my manager and saying 'I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to do any of it. Forget it.' So where everybody thinks [Epic] shelved the album, that is actually when I just said, 'I quit.' It was the only thing I thought I could do.'

She wasn't bluffing. 'You could call it brave if it had been some strategy,' says Apple of her decision to walk away from Extraordinary Machine. 'When I wasn't sure I could put out the album, it hurt but it didn't hurt. I figured, 'Oh, that's just what was supposed to happen. I'll just find a new place in the world.'' She had done some volunteer work with kids with emotional difficulties years before and loved it. Now she filled out an application to intern for an organization called Green Chimneys in upstate New York, which uses farm 'therapy' animals to help troubled kids.

But then, in June 2004, two songs from the Jon Brion sessions ? the title track and 'Better Version of Me' ? were leaked onto the Internet. (Apple, Brion, and Epic all vehemently deny being the source of the leak.) Fans, who'd been waiting since 1999 with growing frustration for new music from Apple, went into an uproar. 'I was not thrilled with the idea that there was Fiona Apple music out there that I couldn't listen to,' says 21-year-old Dave Muscato, a Columbia, Mo., musician who a few months later launched FreeFiona.com, a site devoted to rescuing Apple's music from purgatory. 'We decided to do something about it and get a petition going.'

Apple was visiting her mother in New York last January when her manager called and told her about a protest being staged in her name. Muscato, along with 45 other die-hard fans, were picketing outside Sony's Manhattan offices, demanding they release her album. 'I remember very clearly going into the back room of my mother's apartment and my sister was sitting at the computer,' says Apple. 'I said, 'Look up Free Fiona.' First I started laughing, saying, 'This is hilarious, people are protesting and I'm sitting on my ass watching reruns of Columbo. I'm not on the phone with my lawyers trying to get my album released, I'm applying to Green Chimneys!' And then I started crying because I really felt touched. It's an incredible feeling to feel like all these people who you don't know care about you. And it was bigger than me, it was about what was going on in the music industry and anybody deciding what's sellable. And then I started feeling guilty, because it wasn't the truth. The album hadn't really been shelved. What was I going to do, tell all these people to stop, tell them that I had done the quitting? But I quit because I felt that what was going to happen was what they thought was already happening.' (Sony says that they would never have shelved her CD. 'We would have put out any record that Fiona turned in to us as a finished album,' says Anthony.)

But while Apple thought she could walk away for good, the pull of her unfinished album sucked her back in. She reached out to her former manager Andy Slater, who now heads Capitol Records, and asked him to buy out her contract. But those plans were thwarted in March, when a Seattle radio DJ somehow got his hands on the entire album and played it on the air. Fans promptly spread it on the Web. 'I had just gotten a computer and I found out that Extraordinary Machine was on there,' says Apple. 'My heart started beating really fast. It really f---ed things up. It made it so that no one could buy out my contract, because the album's already been heard. And I also felt bad because whoever did this thought they were doing the right thing. Because everyone thought that the record had been shelved [by Sony]. So I was torn between feeling like 'Thank you!' and 'God, no!''

Ultimately, Apple credits all the press attention from the Free Fiona campaign for spooking her label into finally giving her the money and creative freedom to rerecord the album on her terms with Elizondo. In June of 2005, three years after she first started working on Extraordinary Machine, Apple and Elizondo spent five weeks rerecording the songs in his backyard studio outside of Los Angeles.

The Free Fiona message boards are rife with speculation that Apple and Brion had a falling-out, that Epic forced her to cannibalize her record, and that Elizondo was a lackey brought in to gloss up Brion's work. 'Her fans adore her,' says Elizondo. 'They adore Jon. There's such a relationship there. It's probably what Beatles fans felt like when they heard they were working with Phil Spector instead of George Martin. But hopefully now they'll understand there's many different ways to be creative and make records.'

Brion has less patience for fans clinging to conspiracy theories. 'I almost feel like, Hey, anybody who got [Apple's unreleased music] off the Internet ? I understand your interest in hearing it. But [the finished version] is what she's putting out. This is the person you dig and this is what she thinks is cool and get on that.'

These days, Apple's Venice Beach house is nice and cluttered. It's a home she says she loves too much to ever leave. (She still needs a real bed to replace her futon, and a dresser for all the clothes she keeps in bags in a guest room, but there's time for all that.) She's been playing gigs at the L.A. club Largo with Brion on the acoustic guitar and Elizondo on the upright bass. And she stands behind her new record, and also the early version that leaked this year. 'I would not have dealt with any of this bulls--- if I wasn't proud of the songs that I've written.' And Sony is, says Anthony, 'just so happy and excited for her that she's finally done and she's happy with the record.'

Early stories about Extraordinary Machine painted her label as the big bad corporation that pushed around a vulnerable little girl. In the end, isn't it nice to know that she herself did the pushing? 'I've been in the driver's seat throughout this,' Apple says. 'Sometimes not driving. Sometimes not actually moving. I was stalled for a long time, but I've definitely been in the driver's seat. And by the way, that's something I learned very early on by giving a certain speech [at the VMAs]. I can make these decisions and no one can force you to do anything. No one could have tied me up and they couldn't have made me sing. You can't squeeze the notes out of my throat.'

Ask Apple if she's thought about what she'll say if she wins at next year's VMAs, and she claps her hands and leans in conspiratorially. 'Not enough people would get it, so I would never do this. But there's a part of me that would really want to make a completely sweet speech and then at the end say, 'This world is bulls---!'' Her big eyes light up at the idea and she bursts out laughing. 'I just think it would be really funny if people were like, 'Oh, God. Not again.''

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