The Caged Bird Sings

"We should try to make a collage, OK?" Fiona Apple suggests as she sits on the floor of a New York hotel room. Last night's effort, painted and pasted onto the newspaper sports section, says, IN THE CASE OF A SHORTER GIRL STUDYING THE WORDS THAT FILL LONGER DAYS. We look through magazines for phrases to use, to distort. I half-heartedly offer a New York Times editorial headline: NOVEMBER DARKNESS, NOVEMBER LIGHT. She picks up her scissors and snips free the word ember. After that, I leave her to it. She collects suitable words all the time. She keeps spare words on the tour bus, in the food drawer.

As she collages, she mentions how ludicrous some of the attention she receives is, and for some reason we try to work out the appropriate mathematical equations that explain this.

ME: Uninteresting plus famous equals interesting.

Fiona Apple: [Nodding] Or normal plus famous equals special.

When I arrived, at four in the afternoon, Fiona Apple answered the door in a white bathrobe. She has just woken up. Now dressed, she sits on the floor, on the quilt from the bed next door that has been laid out over the carpet, exactly parallel to the walls, neatly folded back where it meets the couch. Two candles have been carefully placed at either end of a diagonal across the room. She is particular about these things. Often she has to change hotel rooms because the rug is the wrong color, or the bed is too close to the door and she'll feel as though someone might come in and suffocate her. "I've been sick for two months," she explains. "There's a lot going on in my head; there's a lot going on in my personal life; there's a lot going on everywhere." And she will do whatever she needs to do to cope: "I am going to fucking put my candles where I want, and I am going to make my dumb collages."

The radio is tuned to a hip-hop station. She does not travel with music and says that she bought only one new CD in 1997: Wu-Tang Forever. There is no TV. "I decided that TV was evil," she explains with a smile. And she was worried that she was relying on her standard method of getting to sleep in hotels: "Get stoned and watch TV." So she asked the hotel to have the TVs physically removed.

ME: Demanding request plus famous equals, "It'd be a pleasure."

Fiona Apple: Exactly. [Laughs] Or it could also equal "You fucking egotistical patronizing bitch."