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Top of the pips: Fiona Apple’s 20 greatest songs – ranked!
As her classic album When the Pawn … turns 25, we pick the best of a singer-songwriter whose portraits of love and selfhood are unforgettably vivid
Opening with Apple’s voice, unaccompanied but for rolling timpani drums, before building into a hypnotic round, Hot Knife makes clear her innate – and idiosyncratic – grasp of melody and rhythm. Earning Apple a best female rock vocal performance nod at the Grammys in 2001 (she lost to Sheryl Crow), Paper Bag packs the heavy weight of disillusionment into a deceptively understated package. On the opening track of Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Apple wills a relationship into being – and the tensions play out on the piano, her swirling right-hand and thundering left mirroring her oscillations between uncertainty and resolve.
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