Fiona Apple

Tidal

Fiona Apple was born in New York City in 1977, the youngest daughter of the actor Brandon Maggart, and grew up between her mother's home in New York and her father's in Los Angeles. She studied piano as a child, began writing songs at eight, and found Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald along the way. In 1994 a demo tape with three songs reached the Sony executive Andy Slater, who signed her. Slater produced her debut, Tidal, released on the Work label on 23 July 1996, when she was 18. Jenn Pelly of Pitchfork wrote that he built the sound around Apple's interests in hip-hop, classical composers and old-school singers.

Tidal produced three singles, Shadowboxer, Sleep to Dream and Criminal. Criminal reached 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. The album sold 2.7 million copies and was certified three times Platinum in the United States. At the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, accepting Best New Artist in a Video for Sleep to Dream, she told the audience that "this world is bullshit" and to go with themselves. Much of the press condemned the speech. She answered in Rolling Stone in January 1998: when she has something to say, she will say it.

Brion, delays and The Idler Wheel

When the Pawn... (1999) was produced by Jon Brion and took its title from a 90-word poem Apple wrote after readers' reactions to a Spin cover story about her. Its lead single, Fast as You Can, became her first top-40 hit in the United Kingdom, and the album went Platinum. After the 2000 tour she moved to Los Angeles. In 2002 she agreed to make a third record with Brion, and the sessions ran into 2003, but the album did not appear. Tracks leaked onto the internet in 2004 and 2005, and fans ran a campaign to have the record released. Apple chose to remake it with Mike Elizondo and Brian Kehew, and Extraordinary Machine came out in October 2005, debuting at seven on the Billboard 200.

Seven years later The Idler Wheel... arrived. She had recorded it without the label knowing, producing it with her touring drummer Charley Drayton. It reached three on the Billboard 200, her highest debut, and was nominated for the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Apple began rehearsing the next album in February 2015 with the bassist Sebastian Steinberg, the drummer Amy Aileen Wood and the multi-instrumentalist Davíd Garza. They moved from a Texas studio to her house in Venice, Los Angeles, where much of it was recorded in GarageBand, with found objects as percussion and long single takes. She announced Fetch the Bolt Cutters in a New Yorker profile in March 2020 and released it on 17 April, earlier than Epic had planned. Pelly called it "unbound" in Pitchfork, which gave it a perfect score, and it holds 98 on Metacritic. It debuted at four on the Billboard 200. At the 63rd Grammy Awards it won Best Alternative Music Album, and Shameika won Best Rock Performance. Laura Barton of the Guardian called the record "a sudden glorious eruption", and its title track, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, quotes a line from the television series The Fall.

Elsewhere

Between albums Apple sang with Johnny Cash on a version of Bridge over Troubled Water, wrote the opening theme for the Showtime series The Affair, and released Tiny Hands for the Women's March on Washington in 2017. In 2020 she played piano on Bob Dylan's Murder Most Foul, and she later sang the Ring Verse in the end credits of the first season of The Rings of Power. In May 2025 she released Pretrial (Let Her Go Home), a song against cash bail inspired by her work as a volunteer court watcher. She has also pledged two years of earnings from placements of Criminal and Shameika to the While They Wait fund and the Harlem Children's Zone. Three of her albums appear on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums.