Fiona Apple sat down for a rare broadcast interview about her new album Fetch the Bolt Cutters on Democracy Now!. She discussed the album’s themes, the inclusion of Indigenous land acknowledgments in the album’s credits, and much more. Watch the full interview below.
The album’s credits end with acknowledgment that it was recorded “on unceded Tongva, Mescalero Apache, and Suma territories.” The decision to include that language was made with Eryn Wise, an organizer and activist with the Indigenous-led collective Seeding Sovereignty who was interviewed in the same episode. “It’s just very important to keep on saying it, because it’s not in everybody’s day-to-day life,” Apple told Amy Goodman of the acknowledgment. “People aren’t thinking about this every day, and they really should be—that we are not living on land that was ceded to us.”
Apple discussed the process of recording the new album, including the moment she fully embraced her anger while singing the version of “Ladies” that appears on Fetch the Bolt Cutters. “One day, I sang that line, and it sank into me,” she said. “And I finally felt the anger that I had never felt for the man who assaulted me when I was a child. I sang that line over and over again until I really felt it. And when I felt it, I finally felt anger, and it was an amazing thing. And you need to feel your anger in order to get past it.”
She also discussed the label’s proposal that she release the album in October and why she fought to have it come out earlier.