Fiona Apple

View moreBrowse piano sheets by Fiona Apple on Zen Virtual Piano. The magazine calls her a musically precocious descendant of a line of entertainers, a classically trained pianist who began composing at seven. She later began to play along with jazz standards, discovering Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, who became major influences. A classical start at the piano and a turn to jazz records suggest a musician who kept finding new teachers on the shelf. Her first shared tape was all it took: a friend gave a copy to the publicist she babysat for, and the publicist passed it on to Andrew Slater, a prominent record producer and manager. A tape passed from friend to babysitting client to producer looks like a short route to an audience. Many of her early songs are postmortems of broken relationships; I Know concerns a boyfriend who lasted only a short time yet gave her a key word for a song. On that track, her producer Jon Brion used an orchestra, with Jim Keltner on drums and Mike Elizondo on upright bass. King Princess joined her in January 2019 for a version of her 1999 song I Know. A short relationship that left behind one useful word shows how small an origin a song can have. She keeps index cards of words such as Angel, Excel, Intel and Gel, and above her drafts she writes the alphabet while looking for puns, rhymes and accidental insights. Files named things like metal shaker, couch tymp and bean drums began as long, uncut takes of her hitting instruments against random things, and she built them into a percussion orchestra for making songs. Index cards of rhymes and a percussion orchestra made from household sounds point to a method built on collecting and arranging.

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