Look at, look at, look at me I'm all the fishes in the sea

Neal Slavin, Miss USA and Miss Universe, 1973

Irving Penn, Fashion, 1950

Idler Wheel's Lyrics

As I have been listening more or less on loop to Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel... (you can read some of my thoughts on it here), and I always connect to music through the lyrics, here are 10 favourite lines from this album (in no particular order):

• "He makes my heart a cinemascope screen showing the dancing bird of paradise" Hot Knife
• "While you were watchin' someone else I stared at you and cut myself" Valentine
• "I guess I just must be a daredevil I don't feel anything until I smash it up" Daredevil
• "I can love the same man and the same bed and the same city but not in the same room it's a pity" Left Alone
• "How can I ask anyone to love me when all I do is beg to be left alone?" - Left Alone
• "I ran out of white dove feathers to soak up the hot piss that comes through your mouth every time you address me" - Regret
• "The pain comes in like a second skeleton trying to fit beneath the skin I can't fit the feelings in" Every Single Night
• "My breast's gonna bust open/ The rib is the shell and the heart is the yolk/ I just made a meal for us both to choke on" Every Single Night

I just want to feel everything

Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than The Driver of The Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do - the title is a metaphor on the importance of things that go unnoticed in our own lives - is one of my new musical addictions.

Similarly to the rest of Fiona Apple's music, it is a brilliant, uniquely powerful expurgation of the ugly, petty feelings that so often take control of our relationships and progressively tear us apart. It is stunning in its biting, raw nakedness: listening to it seems to awaken all your senses and stimulate the feelings we so strive to keep under control. 

I love her thick, feverish voice, dripping with sarcasm and rage, the unconventional violence in the piano, the primitive beats in the background. The lyrics are filled with strong, often sexual or disturbing imagery, violent self-awareness and a corrosive sense of humour - they are an hallucinated punch straight on your face. At the same time, it feels like you are finding power to fight against everything you hate, and to finally, finally embody your own self (that undefined, contradictory construct) in the face of the whole world. Strength and vulnerability annihilate each other in a glorious cathartic explosion.

Check out the surreal video to Every Single Night:

Every single night
I endure the flight
Of little wings of white-flamed
Butterflies in my brain
These ideas of mine
Percolate the mind
Trickle down the spine
Swarm the belly, swelling to a blaze
That's when the pain comes in
Like a second skeleton
Trying to fit beneath the skin
I can't fit the feelings in
Every single night's alight with my brain

(...)

I just want to feel everything

You can listen to the full album here - what are you waiting for to start obsessing over Fiona Apple?