The Constant Record: Fiona Apple’s Tidal

Pale September and I’m wearing the time like an Ugg. Beating down months til my clogs switch from black to dusty white. Feels redundant to say but as much as I wish my Uggs could stay with me forever, just like time they must fade away. That’s the ironically tragic thing about giving items sentimental value, they become more than a shoe, more than a ring, more than an album, they feel like an other. A ubiquitous other, a one phone-call away memory, a friend doing a Master’s in another country, they exist, they mean something to you, yet they feel intangible, almost undetectable. This is how I feel revisiting Fiona Apple’s Tidal as it passes its 30th year around the sun.

Fiona Apple’s Tidal and I | Original Photo Courtesy of Ariel Rivera

Released on July 23, 1996, Tidal was Fiona Apple’s debut album. Shocking the world with her mature lyricism and musical production, Apple became one of the 90’s leading voices in alternative pop and stretched the understanding of what popular music could be. For reference, the highest selling album of the year was Celine Dion’s Falling Into You, “Criminal” is a far jump from “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now”, and with Apple selling nearly 3 million copies of Tidal it seemed like the 18 year-old songstress found an audience with those craving a refuge from the saccharine. With those who walk around blurry eyed, dazed, and angry, this is how Fiona Apple found me.

My first bite of Apple can be dated back to 2014, prematurely watching American Horror Story at odd hours of the night as Sarah Paulson wailed her way through a rendition of “Criminal”. What a first taste it was! “I’ve been a bad, bad girl/ I’ve been careless with a delicate man/ And it’s a sad, sad world/ When a girl will break a boy just because she can”, I was impaled immediately, staked through the groin, punched through the abdomen, the song had a hold on me. It would be about 3 years until “Criminal” would find me again, this time with Apple’s original rendition. Aside from not having two heads, there was a glaring difference between Sarah Paulson and Fiona Apple singing the same song yet arousing entirely different feelings within me. Apple’s had grit.

Apple for Tidal | The Chant

I was now 13 and experiencing every emotion at its extreme, angst was king. The child was gone, going around town feeling like Holden Caulfield angry at everything’s apparent phoniness and observing things with a tinge of pubescent arousal, misery, and wrath, and because of that, Tidal’s grit was astonishing. “Sleep To Dream” anthemed my mood, the pure frustration of that song cyphoned the album with immediate edge and groundedness. Everyone sucks, this world is bullshit, and what’s left to do other than write about it or rot.

Tidal was no holds barred media, leave it all on the floor music, animalistically real, carnally mad. Tidal got low and met me in the pits of tar I felt I was waddling amuck in, staining everything black with every breath. Desperation and shame were defining characters, fatal flaws to my teenagedom, so alas “Shadowboxer” spoke to me best. Lines like  “Oh, it's so evil, my love/The way you've no reverence to my concern/So I'll be sure to stay wary of you, love/To save the pain of once my flame and twice my burn” staged scenes from afterschool Snapchat misfires. 

If “Shadowboxer” allowed me to sit in my reek, then “Slow Like Honey” snapped me out of it and gave me fantasy - “I'll let you see me/I'll covet your regard/I'll invade your demeanor/And you'll yield to me/Like a scent in the breeze”, sings Apple as I daydreamed besting the bisexual demon I was quarreling with at the time. Being removed from all that now I can find humor in my more than likely overdramatic behavior, but in the moment everything felt so immediate. Fiona Apple has only gotten better with each project she releases, yet that immediacy is what has kept me coming back to Tidal time and time again. In some ways, it’s my most reliable friend. Everything is changing, everyone is leaving, Tidal may leave too one day and all the songs that meant everything to me at 13 and 23 may be aimless sounds at 53, yet it meant something to me at one point and I pray I never forget that.

Tidal moves like a madman’s impassioned ramblings, yet what it really reveals itself to be (and what charges me every time I think too hard about it) is a teenager looking out at the world they were promised would be good to them, a golden world with hopes, dreams, endless possibilities, and see that that was all a lie. A girl betrayed, a child heavy with mood. 

Fiona Apple for Tidal | Billboard

And I suddenly feel like a different person

From the roots of my soul come a gentle coercion

And I ran my hands o'er a strange inversion

As the darkness turns into the dawn

- “The Child is Gone”, Fiona Apple

Strike Out, 

Ariel Rivera

Miami


Ariel Rivera is a Miami-based writer and editor covering culture, film, music, and media. Their work has appeared in Strike Magazine and is forthcoming in Summur Magazine. They also publish essays, commentary, and prose independently through their Substack, Nearsplendor. Inspirations include: the sun, ube, film photography, Celine Song, and his dog, Neo.

Edited by Ansley Ryan.