Fiona Apple

I thought this album was the most musically jarring record I’ve ever heard. She uses percussion instruments a lot, so much so that I can’t remember hearing a guitar or even much of piano. Still, my taste is somehow in sync with hers, and I ended up giving higher ratings to songs that I was ambivalent about.

Fiona's second album was a throaty dark jazzy-bluesy effort that cost her a mass audience but gained her a cult. I never liked the story of the museum guard who told sneering school boys that the pictures weren't on trial. Still … why the heck wouldn't "On the Bound" or "Paper Bag" or "Fast As You Can" or "Get Gone" become hits? What the hell were people listening to in the late 1990s?