Displaying wit even in her woe, an incisive and often paradoxical Apple survives and lives to tell the tales with poetic, passionate intensity in quirkily unconventional and evocative language. From "To Your Love": "My derring-do allows me to dance the rigadoon / Around you / But by the time I'm close to you, I lose / My desideratum and now you..."
This kind of recklessness also sees Apple's finely-honed songwriting craftsmanship somehow — it's a subtle circumvention at play here — eluding for the most part any pervading insinuation of forced affectation or mope-and-cope shoe-gazing surrender. Apple won't be pinned down and pegged: She can implore that the object of her disaffection not "be down when my demeanor seems to disappoint / It's hard enough even to be civil to myself" ("To Your Love"). But a few songs later, she's almost gleefully acquired "a taste for the well-made mistake," as she rallies and moves on in a refreshingly cavalier and carefree fashion: "I'm gonna fuck it up again / I'm gonna do another detour / Unpave my path."
But no matter how much you may want to cover your tracks, that new path might be as circular as it is scenic, leading you back to square one. In When the Pawn's powerfully propulsive first cut, "On The Bound," the more metaphoric first cut runs deepest in an unflinching tone that seemingly makes up Apple's default tenor: "It's true, I do imbue my blue unto myself / I make it bitter" — and by the last line we've hit rock bottom as an apparent defeatist defines herself abjectly, wearily and warily intoning, "Baby say that it's all gonna be alright / I believe that it isn't."
Sometimes, nevertheless, the bitter is sweet, if short lived, and this sense of contrariness and pessimism sounds nothing like the blithe pop spirit of "Paper Bag," with its infectious, lilting melody set to a shuffle rhythm, and topped with wistful but ultimately dashed hopes for a new love "whose reality I knew, was a hopeless to be had." With "Paper Bag's" bleak outlook hemmed and hawed to perpetual impasse — in "The Way Things Are" Apple bemoans that "I wouldn't know what to do with another chance / If you gave it to me" — it doesn't take too long for self-fulfilling prophecies to profit not:
- But then the dove of hope began its downward slope
And I believed for a moment that my chances
Were approaching to be grabbed
But as it came down near, so did a weary tear
I thought it was a bird, but it was just a paper bag.
Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills
Cuz I know I'm a mess he don't wanna clean up
I got to fold cuz these hands are too shaky to hold
Hunger hurts, but starving works,
When it costs too much to love.
Tough nut to crack, and this is only the emotive pendulum swing at mid-stroke. "All my life is on me now, hail the pages turning / And the future's on the bound, hell don't know my fury," Apple ferociously sings in "On the Bound." And you believe her when she warns, "My pretty mouth will frame the phrases that will / Disprove your faith in man" (Fast As You Can.)
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