Fiona Apple, a Grammy-winning artist, sang at the Mesa Arts Center Tuesday night to promote her new album. (Photo by Kurtis Semph)How can a woman that gives so much away on her records reveal so little on stage?
In her hour and a half set, in which she played 17 songs, a mixture of familiar hits mixed with selections from “The Idler Wheel…,” vocalist Fiona Apple sung at the Mesa Arts Center Tuesday night with her usual mixture of passionate intent contrasted against a sense of detachment.
Singing away on stage, Apple occupied her own personal space for much of the show’s duration, as if she was so hermetically sealed from the audience that not even the calls of adoration could shake her attention.
Her attention focused more to the expert recording quality of her touring band, especially guitarist Blake Mills, who opened the show.
Only a few times did she interact with audience members; the most notable after “Not About Love” when she briefly railed against her record label and offered tips on how petite girls could enhance their figures.
Attending a Fiona Apple concert is tricky business. On one hand, since her early touring days in the late 1990s, evidence exists that the singer possesses her own internal mechanics that give her confidence to get through sets before large crowds. On the other, it’s a luck of the draw on how engaged with the audience she will be.
Without a doubt, her stage persona provided endless fascination. Many songs she emoted with her entire body. Mixed in with those songs, Apple clutched the microphone with the will of someone holding onto a lifeline, and on others, she was at ease with her eyes closed and hands arched behind her back.
Apple spoke few words, but her music did most of the talking. She performed the music loyal to the material on her albums, yet gave herself room to maneuver to extemporize and play around live.
On “Daredevil,” a song about her destructive streak in relationships, when Apple reached the point in the song where she sings that she “may need a chaperone,” the line erupted from her, as if to say that she means it now more than ever.
Like “Daredevil,” on “Not About Love,” with each successive shout of the title, it became a very unrefined primal shout into the open space that felt like a kidney punch.
Before everyone knew it, the music was over. Apple’s command on the material received an all around applause.
More of that aching, full-bodied intent elsewhere showed up on her rendition of “Shadowboxer,” when she placed emphasis on the words, “I was onto every play / I just wanted you.”
It may have seemed like unfocused shouts, and they were at times, but overall, Apple continued to show her precision at wringing out lyrical moments of gut-wrenching sincerity to place even more emphasis on the written words.
An early hit, “Sleep to Dream,” a kiss-off song, came off as less like the young adult who sang it in 1996 and more like a 35-year-old, who has more experience under her belt.
The night was full of peaks, but one of the show’s pinnacles came early on when she sang “Anything We Want,” which the singer sparkled and brought more winning charm than on the album, if that were possible.
It’s her most recent song that emanates with overflowing bliss and optimism, something uncommon for an artist who writes many about the aftermath.
It’s a shame Apple wasn’t up for an encore.
Reach the reporter at tccoste1@asu.edu
