After a Fiona Apple concert, you get this lump of emotions growing on your throat during the following night, that you want to spit it out violently into writing, but it gets difficult as she is the words master, and yours fail at describing the intensity she projects on stage.
On Sunday night, she looked underfed and her salient cheekbones under the green-blue lights of the Palladium got me worry for her a few times. That’s the deal with Fiona, you get to truly care about her, the songs are so painfully personal that you relate so much, and during her performance, she seemed to extract her tunes from the depth of her breast, while repeatedly stabbing herself with the piano keys and moving her leg in a disarticulated manner. She bent her body and balanced like a nervous and angry little girl, she did the crazy dancing and crawled on the floor in a fetus position…, she gave all she had, she sang, shouted and moaned her poignant lyrics as if she were giving her last performance.
Not surprisingly, there was a terribly long line outside the Palladium several hours before the show, the show had sold out a long time ago and it was the last performance on the first part of her tour. Fiona actually arrived half an hour late on stage, I saw the worried look of the security guard in front of me, frowning at the stage, still dark at 9:30 pm, I heard people starting booing, I was imagining Fiona backstage having a meltdown, and I admit it, for a fraction of second, I had a thought about a public statement announcing a refund… but fortunately Fiona finally arrived on stage with her musicians and layers of veils, a green one in her hand, a red t-shirt on her left shoulder, that she wore as a sort of cape or scarf afterwards.
She apologized for the lateness, she was nervous she said, and starting from this, she hardly stopped during her set, just a few times to sip her tea or water, leaving the 3-4,000 people who had packed the place in complete awe. I will admit it, the perpetual sing-along was touching but super annoying, I know you are all fans and know all the lyrics of all the songs, but I came here to hear Fiona and not your amateur karaoke.
But she sounded plain amazing, with an electrifying and buoyant energy, starting her set with four old songs,… ‘Something new, Fiona!’ shouted someone in the crowd, I don’t think she heard it, but she immediately sang ‘Anything We Want’ off her latest album, after declaring ‘Everybody should be in a band’.
She was smiling but shaking under her vulnerable skin, alternating between the standing mic and her piano. She started ‘Get Gone’ with a stripped down piano and her strong voice backed up by the hushed murmur from the crowd, before exploding with the keys and the rest of the band, and continued with a rap-delivery on ‘Sleep to Dream’, looking angrier and sicklier than ever, doing a tap-leg dancing and then crawling on all fours on the ground.
She seemed to intensively live through her songs, while anxiously pulling her hair and changing her hairstyle at each song: She arrived with her hair free, but at ‘Tymps’, she had a ponytail. This song had this peculiar circus ambiance but ended with opener Blake Mills’ distorted and furious guitar solo, and Fiona on the ground once again. Some of the tunes had fresh arrangements very well executed by her impressive backing band, which also consisted of Sebastian Steinberg on bass, Amy Wood on drums, and Zac Rae on organ.
She expressed all the angry weirdness of ‘Daredevil’, even getting behind the drums, peeling down a layer or two, then seduced with a smoky voice, bringing tears in people’s eyes during ‘I Know’, she was all bangs up during ‘Criminal’, shouting and kneeling down once again, raising her own hell a few times, crashing on the floor but looking indestructible, resurrecting and then, during the last song before the encore, screaming ‘This is not about love/’Cause I am not in love’, modulating her voice a hundred times, running her hands on the piano keys, and showing none of her announced fright stage.
The crowd, which was practically cheering up at each of her multiple-personalities songs, was shouting a heartfelt ‘I love you’ every five seconds. I can’t say there was a highlight of the show as every tune, old or new, sounded as a culminating point.
She may be one of our greatest performers, she can hold between her hands a large place like the Palladium as well as the intimate room at Largo. On Sunday night, she was a survivor of love fights and life struggles, she tore down her fears with her stormy love songs, she looked as focused as a fierce animal, and crucifies herself while covering with rage all the range of human emotions, ‘I just wanna feel everything’, she effectively sang in ‘Every Single Night’. The only song for the encore was a Conway Twitty cover, and if the lyrics suddenly sounded so simple compared to her brilliant and tortured poetry, the nice country ballad – with lyrics such as ‘Some day you'll care for me, but it's only make believe’ – totally sounded like one of her pain unifying tunes.
Setlist
1 Fast As You Can
2 On the Bound
3 Shadowboxer
4 Paper Bag
5 Anything We Want
6 Get Gone
7 Sleep to Dream
8 Extraordinary Machine
9 Werewolf
10 Tymps (The Sick In The Head Song)
11 Daredevil
12 I know
13 Every Single Night
14 Criminal
15 Carrion
16 Not About Love
17 It’s Only Make Believe (Conway Twitty cover)