VaffanBrodo

il buco con la vita intorno

mollyknight:

hailthepagesturning:

It’s 1 p.m., and Jon Brion is still in his pajamas and slippers. For the past three months, Brion, Tom Biller, an engineer, and the singer Fiona Apple have been living at the Paramour. Right now, Brion is noodling at a Casio keyboard, playing along to a mix of Apple’s ”Oh Well.” ”I cried the first time I heard her play this,” Brion says. ”We were at Ocean Way, Sinatra’s old studio, and I just put my head down on the table and cried.”

As ”Oh Well” plays repeatedly, Brion tries to conceive an arrangement that won’t disturb the power of Apple’s vocals. He says he thinks her delivery on the current version might be too slow for the anger of the words. To help, Brion has written out the lyrics in color-coded fashion on two giant pieces of white paper. Blue represents sad passages, red anger and green the resignation of Apple’s whispering ”Oh, well” in the last line.

”There’s a space between this line and that line, and it’s this continual sort of push and pull,” Brion says. ”If she’s not singing, I offer something to carry the listener through to the next moment where she returns.”

“Lost in the Music” (New York Times, August 2003)

Ha. I posted this to my tumblr before I realized my friend Stephen Rodrick had written it.

probably my favourite version of my favourite song from that record