Ants and elephants: The lyric Fiona Apple is most proud of writing
Since taking her first steps into the music industry almost three decades ago, Fiona Apple has penned some of the most stunning, shocking, and saddening lyrics in modern music. Tackling her struggles with mental illness, womanhood, and love and loss, her words are unflinchingly vulnerable, never failing to cut through the swirling art pop she drapes around them.
Apple’s most recent full-length offering, 2020’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters, is a prime example of her unparalleled songwriting prowess. In just under an hour of music, she covers almost every facet of womanhood, good and bad, over twinkling keys and off-kilter percussion. In ‘Ladies’, for example, she tackles her feelings towards her partners’ exes with a newfound tenderness, declaring, “No love is like any other love, so it would be insane to make a comparison with you.”
The record is filled to the brim with examples of her masterful lyricism, from the uncompromising ‘Under The Table’ to the resentment and intentional repetition in ‘Relay’. The record, rightfully, won her universal acclaim from critics and audiences alike, who found themselves deeply affected by her words. For some, it seemed like the culmination of years spent honing her lyricism.
But for Apple, the lyric she was most proud of writing came years before Fetch the Bolt Cutters arrived. In 2012, she released the lengthily titled The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, an album that featured her favourite self-penned lyrics.
Those lyrics come towards the end of track five, ‘Left Alone’. As she wonders how to find love when all she wants is to be left alone, Apple sprinkles in some of her greatest lyricism yet. She rhymes “orotund mutt” with “moribund slut,” uses alliteration with abandon, and describes tears calcifying in her abdomen. But the best line in the song, according to Apple herself, is one of the simplest.
“The ants weigh more than the elephants,” she sings over wavering piano lines and subtle percussion. While answering questions in a YouTube fan question and answer, Apple declared this the lyric she’s proudest of writing. “I just think it’s true,” she declared. The songwriter saw David Attenborough deliver the fact in one of his specials.
“And I just thought, ‘Well, it’s true in nature. It’s true outside. It’s true inside,’” the songwriter concluded. The lyric certainly is masterfully written. It’s so simple in its meaning and form, and yet, it’s so effective. The internal rhyme is pleasing to the ear, and it’s a funny, strange image to conjure up, one that makes you consider its content with a furrowed brow. Surely, the ants can’t weigh more than the elephants.
It’s also a phrase that extends beyond its literal meaning. It could be applied to worry, a metaphor for how lots of little anxieties can build up and become even more debilitating than bigger problems. It could even be applied to society on a wider scale, to the masses outweighing and outnumbering those who horde power or money.
“The ants weigh more than the elephants,” is a great encapsulation of what makes Apple’s writing so great. It can often sound straightforward and to the point, but her words are always steeped in real meaning and thought, and, most of all, in truth.