Slow love coming... Fiona Apple's "When The Pawn..."

There are music albums that I have in my ever expanding collection that over the course of years, or even decades, do not grow on me. I can’t help it, it’s usually music by some great artist, all the critics love him or her, but it’s not going on rotation in my personal playlists and when I encounter a single random song during jogging or in the car, I press “Skip.”

Fiona Apple’s sophomore album “When the pawn…” was such an album. I had bought it when it came out in 1999 on CD, sold the CD later, kept the MP3s in my iTunes collection, added the album after I started out with Apple Music a few years back. And yet, I think most songs on the album remained unplayed and un-starred over all those twenty-one years. Fiona’s debut album shone over everything, never to be surpassed, and all the other three albums that followed never reached that unique first album.

Came today.

I stumbled upon a Fiona Apple video on YouTube about her rendition of “Why try to change me now”, followed by “When I get low I get high”. Both not songs on the “When the pawn…” album. But still, I wanted to hear more of her voice, while I did some new plotting and sketching of my next project, I ran through the “When the pawn” album and, man, wonderful. Sometimes 21 years are worth the wait.