“Sleep to Dream”
With a sparse drum and a couple clicks, the first track of Tidal opens the album in the only appropriate way — by giving Fiona Apple’s vocals the stage. With a solid conviction, she shuns the careless and ineligible ways of a past lover. Written at just 14 years old but filled with seemingly a lifetime of knowledge, Apple brushes off the echoes of mediocrity and fabrications of this past partner, and warns with a gapless “this mind, this body, and this voice cannot be stifled/By your deviant ways” against any attempts at his return. She skips confidently through her poetry-inspired lines, grounding herself “feet on the ground” against her flighty “head in the clouds” ex, sending herself worlds past with her honest disposition and intolerance for being weighed down. No lover will suffocate her; she sets herself free. As she asserts on close of the first song of her first album, she has her “own hell to raise.” So she launches into “Sullen Girl,” and she does.
“Sullen Girl”
The bare minimalist piano composition that opens “Sullen Girl” offers Apple at her most confessional. Smooth and slow, she floats through the ocean she makes of her lyrics, creating a hypnotic portrait of her wish to break from her monotonous float through grief, but expressing to everyone who assesses her lingering in the raw as moping that “it’s calm under the waves in the blue of my oblivion.” She addresses the accusation of her as a “sullen girl, sullen girl,” and reminds of the psychological and emotional impact of being raped outside her home in Harlem at twelve years old, an event which stole from her innocence, security and childhood. She divulges this trauma through another water-based metaphor, describing how as a child, she “used to sail the deep and tranquil sea/But he washed me ‘shore, and he took my pearl/And left an empty shell of me.” Finding steady footing in the synth that rises to meet her as the song goes on, Apple finds the line between her poetic literary inspirations and raw, unbreakable presentation of truth. On it this song balances the grief of this trauma.
“Shadowboxer”
Fiona Apple raises her fists in the third track, scoffing at a past lover who now assumes a role of friend, but whose “dirty game” Apple knows well, and can no longer entertain the fight of. Swinging back and forth between loving adornments about the subject, she croons the fight between wanting someone and knowing the reality of them is dangerous. The classic battle between brain and heart finds itself in a sultry jazz club inspired piano ballad, displaying Apple’s vintage inspirations such as Ella Fitzgerald, and Apple’s voice strengthens along with the jabbing piano. Not quite ready to drag this lover through the mud for his indiscretions, Apple falls back into croons of want, noting “your gaze is dangerous/ And you fill your space so sweet,” but knows this fight brings only bruises, and rights herself, reminding herself “to save the pain of once my pain and twice my burn.” The steady rock of the piano moves the listener almost like they’re watching two caged fighters, and in a way, Apple is both. Ending on an almost minute-long jazz band instrumental, Apple goes out acknowledging how she looks “swinging around me,” but also her lack of choice with a flame that always goes for the surprise hit.
“Criminal”
“Criminal” opens with the jabbing smirk of a teenage girl who knows her power and is taking it back. She lays assumptions about her flat upon the first lyric, getting mature and cliche as it gets with a winking “I’ve been a bad, bad girl,” and bulldozes anyone dumb enough to believe this is where her bite ends, immediately following with “I’ve been careless with a delicate man.” The poor, poor man she’s “sinned against” gets no stage, and her “criminal” gets all of it. She claims her decimation of the hearts of the young male population, who she is only a threat to, in such “a sad, sad world/When a girl will break a boy just because she can.” Apple is strong and every bit as mature as people claimed she couldn’t be at just eighteen on this track, pulling no punches and sparing no eye roll. She knew how to write a hit, and she proved it. The jab of this song is perfectly nineties, but the finesse could have come from no one else. Every second of the track holds eye contact and tests if you believe Apple’s strength. Her later work proves this as no one-time show of smarts.
“Slow Like Honey”
Sappy and weepy, Apple finds poetry within sparse and margarine-drip-slow lines. Confronting the sweeping and time-taking piano ballad we all knew rested in the pauses of other tracks so far, this track finds Apple and her voice near alone. She passes the test with flying colors. Held up to the previous tracks, this song is more atmospheric than anything, but it displays Apple’s effortless straddle of jazz and blues inspirations, resurrected into the ’90s. She manipulates jazz piano and vibraphone into the mainstream, and hovers over the listener like she does her subject.
“The First Taste”
The twin of “Slow Like Honey,” this track shows off Apple’s smooth jazz inspirations, this time with a more layered instrumentation. This track finds her on top of both acoustic and electric, grounded, hollow, hip-hop inspired beats and sweeping synth, a juxtaposition which her vocals slot right on top of. Divulging into riffs, Apple compliments the introduction of dense instrumental layering by following the waves and valleys within the beat, letting it shine on its own on the way out. When the first piano chord of the next track plays, it’s all too easy to hope for another taste of this switch up.
“Never Is a Promise”
The peak of Apple’s dramatic and flourishing ballads, “Never Is a Promise” sounds fit to be only performed on stage. Heartbreak flows steadily through the vocal, piano, and weeping strings of this track, and as Apple reaches some of her highest notes and softest whispers, the listener finds their sorrow swaddled for nearly six minutes. Perhaps overly dramatic, the track speaks to utter decimation that is perhaps not wise beyond its years, but quintessentially teenage. The raw emotional lens from which Apple observes this world is somehow more accessible here, through its unabashed role as weepy and sensitive. She grapples with a lover who cannot understand what he lets go of, despite claims that he understands. Left alone to grapple with pain that feels world-shattering, Apple doesn’t “know what to believe in” in the face of someone who despite their claims, cannot, or will not, understand who she is. On an island by itself, this is isolation at its peak on Tidal.
“The Child Is Gone”
Calling back to “Sullen Girl” in atmosphere and perhaps topic, “The Child Is Gone” seems to bring back the first handful of tracks on the album. Apple appears to confront the lingering effects of assault and loss of innocence. She searches within herself and finds herself far away, “a stranger to myself,” but urges her lover not to reach for her, as she’s “too far away.” She grapples with the loss of something she sees no way back to, asking for help one second (“Honey, help me out of this mess”) and pushing it away (“Take all of your sympathy and leave it outside”) the next. She wishes desperately for a love that could guide her away from this struggle, and make clear to her the next steps to take, but knows “there’s no kind of loving that can make this/Alright.” Cutting and straight-up, Apple is bloodied with wounds no one can touch.
“Pale September”
A saccharine love song, this track sees “winter giving way to warm.” Apple is poetic and follows the lead of sparse jazz piano. Her voice rings soft and resembles the lullaby she sings to her lover. No longer untouchable, Apple finds all her “armor falling down in a pile at my feet,” displaying vulnerability in a different, open, more romantic way.
“Carrion”
Remarkably sparse and quiet in instrumental support in its introduction, the closing track of Tidal leans the listener closer in toward Apple for guidance. After catching the listener in her web, the track propels into a crescendo which reads bright and blooming in tone, but is quickly followed by “My feel for you, boy, is decaying in front of me/Like the carrion of a murdered prey.” Wedding her light and crashing instrumentals, soft, old-soul inspired vocal melodies and lyrics with sharp, biting metaphors, this track is truly one to close an album so sprawling, drawing each hyper-sensitive line together. In production, this song reminds of Apple’s inspirations from the past, like Nina Simone, but it’s all too easy to hear the future among these lines. The thesis of an album so grand but so short, so confessional but so cagey, and so fierce but so soft, this track bids the listener off with a final parting gift: “the strength to walk away.”
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