There is no reverb on this record, and once you notice that, you can't unhear it.
Fiona Apple made The Idler Wheel in her living room and at the Village studios in Los Angeles, and producer Charley Drayton — who is also the drummer — played percussion on every surface that would hold still long enough. Cardboard boxes. The floor. His own body. The sound is so dry it feels like the music is happening inside your skull, not in front of you.
The Room You're Sitting In
Drayton came up playing with Keith Richards and Divinyls and the Cramps. He's not a delicate player. But listen to what he does on "Every Single Night" — that tick-and-thump groove that sounds like someone trying very hard not to wake the neighbors. It's restraint as a kind of violence.
Apple played the piano herself, obviously. But there are moments where the piano sounds like it was recorded from the next room through a closed door, and other moments where it sounds like she's playing directly into your ear. That's not accident. The engineer here was Ryan Hewitt, who has worked with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Avett Brothers and knows how to make a record breathe.
What's remarkable is what isn't here. No bass guitar on most tracks. No strings trying to explain the emotion to you. Jon Brion, who produced her first two records with all that gorgeous orchestration, is absent entirely. This is the record she made when she decided to stop being decorated.
Singular and Uncompromising
"Werewolf" is the centerpiece for me — the moment where everything the album is attempting becomes crystalline. Her piano lines are chromatic and restless and they never quite land where you expect them to. Her voice goes from a near-whisper to a controlled howl inside the same phrase. When she sings "nothing's gonna stop us now" it sounds like a threat and an apology at the same time.
She's also doing something with lyrics that almost nobody else was doing in 2012. The album title itself — all twenty-three words of it — is a clue. These are not verses shaped to fit the music. The music is shaped to fit the thought, and the thought goes wherever it needs to go, even if that breaks every convention of pop songwriting. "Daredevil" shifts meter mid-sentence. "Regret" is essentially a stream of consciousness that somehow lands with the impact of a well-formed argument.
The record took years to make and cost essentially nothing by major-label standards. Epic Records released it without much fanfare and then watched it get named album of the year by approximately every serious critic with a byline. It debuted at number 23 on the Billboard 200. Fiona Apple seemed unbothered by both the praise and the chart position, which felt entirely correct.
There's a lyric in "Periphery" where she sings "I just want to feel everything." On a different record, from a different artist, that could scan as a platitude. Here it sounds like a technical specification. Like she sat down and engineered a document that would force the feeling to happen, and then submitted it.
Put this on late. Let your system have a quiet moment before the first note.