Apple, Gump, and Smelling the Roses

I've been listening to Fiona Apple's newest album, known in its abbreviated form as "The Idler Wheel," nearly non-stop for the past week.  

What I love about this album, aside from the fact that it's so textured and raw, is that it's clear Fiona Apple doesn't give a shit about the status quo.  She isn't writing for the radio, and she doesn't care if her music fits a genre.  She doesn't even care about her audience or whether anyone knows the word "moribund" or if any of her listeners knows what the fuck she is talking about when she's singing about werewolves and her tears "calcifying" and how she's "all the fishes in the sea."  She changes rhythms every 15 seconds, rhyming in one section but not the next, and she sings and doesn't sing and yells and at times yodels and she puts it all out there with a myriad of instruments, including some that might be Macgyvered (is that a lead pipe she's banging in the track "Anything We Want"?).

I read in The New York Times that she finished the album about a year and a half ago but chose not to release it at the time because of a change in management at her label, and that this delay (coupled with other things going on in her life, I presume) caused her to go to a dark place (darker? isn't she always in a dark place?), and consequently she started walking up a hill outside of her home every day.  According to the article, "She started to climb that hill for eight hours a day, day after day, until she could barely walk, until she was limping, and then until she could not walk at all. Her knees required months of therapy."  

She said of the experience, “I think it’s really healthy to lose things or to give things up for a while, to deprive yourself of certain things. It’s always a good learning experience, because I felt like it really was like, ‘I must learn to walk again.’ I had to walk out all that stuff, and I knew it was stupid, and I kept on walking.”

It made me think of Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump in the scene where he just starts walking, like he needed to walk out all the pain and frustration of his disappointments, of his whole life.  He walked and walked, and soon he had a following.  Some probably thought he was crazy, but many found him inspiring.  I think Fiona is the same kind of icon.  Is she crazy?  Or is she someone who just embraces the moment?  Is it crazy to live that way?

There are moments when I would love to just start walking.  I'd pack a backpack with a few clothes, a can opener, and some money, I'd pick a direction, and I'd move my feet.  I'd leave my head in the dust, leave my bills and obligations, and carry myself forward until my knees gave out, until my body was as wasted as Fiona Apple's, until I was as hairy and clear-eyed as Forrest Gump.  I'd walk until my heart was the only thing still beating.

It took seven years for Apple to finish and release this album.  I wonder if that's because she had long days, like the one I had today, where all she could do was fall asleep in the sun or read poetry or admire the way a neighbor's cat allows a complete stranger to take it in her arms and stroke its spine.  If I live in the buzzed seconds of a honeybee's flight, if I linger in the shadows cast by a fence lit up at night, if I smell the flowers growing there, will I eventually finish writing something so raw it chafes my bones?  Will my audience hear the clanging of a muscle walking free?