Fiona Apple is sober. So sober, in fact, that she declined to attend the Grammys show where Fetch the Bolt Cutters, her 2020 genre-agnostic opus, would win three awards: “I’m just not made for that kind of stuff. I wanna stay sober and I can’t do that sober,” she admitted to her Instagram following in a selfie video.
Her teetotalism follows a lifelong struggle with alcoholism, which she found more destructive for its anaesthetic effects on her emotions than for its toxicity to her body. On making it through hard times with alcohol, she told NPR, “You’re like ‘Yeah, I made it through before, though, right?’ But you don’t really remember making it through before, because you were drunk, so you didn’t really feel the sadness.”
But by the time she recorded Fetch the Bolt Cutters, intoxicants purged from her body, she was really feeling the sadness. And in the absence of depressants, the soft, tender sadness that had shown up on her early records was given the space to evolve into its full form—rage. “Kick me under the table all you want,” she spits at her abusive partner, “I won’t shut up.”
In this way, Fetch the Bolt Cutters (which turned five on April 17) is arguably Apple’s least sober album to date. It’s fiery. It’s loud. It’s at the whim of its pot-clanging impulses. It’s unseemly and embarrassing. It makes you want to dance, cry, throw up, and laugh, all in a brief 52 minutes.
People say that sober thoughts are drunk words, and in her stupor, Apple’s thoughts came out hushed, apologetic, and regretful. Still, five years later, we get unadulterated access to her sober thoughts, expressed as sober words. The result is much more exciting than anything at the bottom of a bottle.
