My First Serendipitous Music Purchase

By Lisa Inger

I remember the first time I found a Fiona Apple CD in the huge record shop in the middle of the city where you could smoke cigarettes and read hand-made ‘zines, buy second hand 70’s shirts and find any album you could imagine on vinyl or disc, there was an upstairs and a downstairs and there was no Britney Spears or Mandy Moore in sight.  This was my heaven at 16.  This was where my birthday money went, this was where I could disappear for hours and this was where I went to be with like-minded, chain smoking souls (who I never spoke to but admired their coolness along with my own).

Back to Miss Apple, I knew I wanted something different that day, Smashing Pumpkins was my staple, a good deal of Australian indie artists as well as the stuff I could always rely on like Everclear, Jeff Buckley and Pink Floyd but I wanted a new sound to dissect and uncover.  I flicked through the CD cases downstairs and saw the clean white, basic outer shell of a fairly nondescript nature. Her name seemed familiar but I didn’t know where from.  I bought it instinctively.  Twenty two dollars was a lot to me at this point in my life so making this particular investment was a big one, especially without a precursory listen.  I made my purchase and swapped the Siamese Dream CD in my Discman for Fiona Apple’s Tidal and in an instant I was home.  Her echoed refrains of a torn, desperate, internal, external, hopeless, obsessive existence made my teenage soul melt.  She was describing the things I felt and wanted to feel, and that later in my life I actually would.  I almost cried as I walked purposefully down the street, it took every bit of my nonchalant exterior to hold before going over the inside booklet cover to cover on the long bus ride home.  This album reached inside and pulled a chord that over my first love, first heartbreak, first experiences of true emotions it has transcended and I can still feel the same way, I can still hear things now in her lyrics that though I heard and loved before, I understand in a different way as it fluxes with my life, and this is 12 years later.  After a month of adoring the album I hand wrote the profound lyrics I connected with the most and spread them across my bedroom wall in winding, sharp edges of silver black and red lettering ‘The shades and shadows undulate in my perception, my feelings swell and stretch I see from greater heights, I understand what I am still too proud to mention to you’.

Tidal, by Fiona Apple

Fiona Apple showed me what it was to be a strong woman with faults and she did it using her voice as an instrument not as a carrier for intent, unlike so many other musicians.  She was a real poet and she was strong, fallible and expressed it all with such clarity.  She also inspired me to stare down the barrel of an unknown gun called Jazz and throw myself upon it, thus resulting in crazy mornings of smoky rooms, billowing curtains and dreams to take the stage in a dark hidden club, by a big double bass, a chilled drummer and me singing ‘Black Coffee’ to a crown of gin swilling, black clad, cool cats.  But that’s a whole other story.

READ MORE BY LISA INGER