Fiona Apple on Maya Angelou, Metaphors, and Language

At Pitchfork, Jenn Pelly talks to Fiona Apple about her latest album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters. In response to Pelly's question about the singer's relationship to poetry, Apple says, "I love the idea of a poem, of all of the power that can go into a space between two words or a repetition of one word, these tiny things that can mean so much and feel so huge." Picking up from there:

My singing self was born out of singing Maya Angelou poems to myself at night going to sleep.

Do you remember which Maya Angelou poems you would sing to yourself?

Well, a very relevant one to now is “Still I Rise.” I remember singing part of one that went, “Pickin ’em up, and layin’ them down, getting to the next town baby.”

How else would you describe your relationship to language?

There was this book that I once bought like 15 copies of that I love so much: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. But I have this horrible thing where I don’t retain information that I read. I read War and Peace and I don’t remember it—though I do remember some of the names. I got War and Peace because I read this article about the old Russian couple who did the translation. They translated a bunch of different books, and I just thought that was the sweetest life: you and your spouse poring over these classic works of literature, and talking about it and interpreting it together, like, “How do we say this the right way?” That’s a really beautiful romantic life.

Read on, rock on, at Pitchfork.