Sullen girl lyrics meaning
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Sullen Girl
Just like the debut by Tori Amos, who was also raped a few years before her debut album, Apple's Tidal was such stunning brilliance, and you can't help feeling partly-fuelled by the preceding few years of working through the emotions and torment the violence perpetrated on each.
While Amos's "Me and a gun" dealt directly with the violence, perhaps because she was older and more able to deal directly to it, "Sullen Girl" is so tenderly tragic, a symphony of sweeping, drowning emotions that so powerfully echo the adolescent mindset. Screaming her overwhelmed emotions with the line: "it's calm under the waves, in the blue of my oblivion", Apple emotionally retreated, retracted: "They don't know I used to sail the deep and tranquil sea, but he washed my shore and he took my pearl and left an empty shell of me." It's such a powerfully beautiful song for all its tragedy, BECAUSE it so poetically captures the theme of her emotions
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“I’ve been a bad, bad girl,” sings Fiona Apple at the beginning of “Criminal,” the best-known song from her debut skiva Tidal, which turned 20 years old this month. Apple, who was just 18 when the skiva dropped in July 1996, once said the song is about “feeling bad for getting something so easily bygd using your sexuality.” The still startling Mark Romanek-directed video, which includes shots of Apple baring her midriff in a way we’re cultured to believe is suggestive, and lying in bed with guys who aren’t fully clothed or fully conscious, seems to present her as a kind of faux-innocent sexual temptress. But as those of us who immersed ourselves in Tidal after “Criminal” caught our eyes and ears would discover, there’s a lot more to this artist than just being a “bad, bad girl.”
The album’s opening song, “Sleep to Dream,” whose lyrics were reportedly written by the New York City born s
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Fiona Apple, Ahead of Her Time
Content warning: this piece contains mentions of sexual assault and trauma.
Before there was Amy Winehouse or Lana del Rey with their confessional lyrics, we had Fiona Apple, a young bold voice from New York whose vocals could blend seamlessly with piano and then flip to a soaring soprano within a single measure. Apple’s debut album, Tidal, arrived in the summer of 1996 when she was only 18 years old. The album takes you on a wave of life’s ups and downs from the perspective of a young woman trying to grapple with it all after enduring a traumatic childhood. Through her lyrical prowess, Apple invites listeners into her world that at points feels like sacred ground to walk on.
Apple opens her freshman album with “Sleep to Dream,” a song in which her voice booms and crashes like water against rocks. She’s a powerful force to reckon with as she belts, “I tell you how I feel but you don’t care/I say tell me the truth, but you don’t dare/Yo