YMMV / Fiona Apple

• Awesome Music: Pretty much all of it. Paper Bag, Criminal, Never is a Promise, O'Sailor and Shadowboxer are a few standouts.
  • Her cover of Across the Universe is frequently stated to be better than the original, which considering who wrote it...
• Even Better Sequel: While all her albums have garnered critical acclaim in some form. 2020's Fetch the Bolt Cutters took this up to eleven, netting the first "10" from Pitchfork in ten years and scoring an initial rating of 100 on Metacritic.
• First Installment Wins: On the other hand, some continue to hold Tidal as her best-regarded and well-known work.
• Heartwarming Moments: Shameika. Not just the song itself, but the backstory behind it. Apple wrote it about an older girl in primary school who came over to her while she was being excluded by other girls at lunch, and told her she 'had potential'. Although the song says 'I'll never see her again', Apple and Shameika - a musician herself - were in fact reunited via a former teacher, and even teamed up for a collaboration, Shameika Said. This article explains Shameika's side of the story in detail. Apple told one website:
  When I first wrote the song, I was not entirely convinced she existed. Because I have this one memory and it’s a very big memory for me. But maybe I created this person. My third-grade teacher, Linda Kunhart, was my favorite teacher. I’ve kept in touch with her over the years. She read the New Yorker article, and the next day, she sent me an email saying, “I heard you wrote about Shameika. I can see her …” She sent me a picture of her. I don’t remember what grade she was in. I was probably 11 or so. I don’t remember why she was talking to me. I just remember being in the cafeteria, a bunch of girls at one end of the table. I came over to sit with them, and they started laughing at me. So I sat one seat away but still tried to be close to them. Shameika came up, and she was like, “Why are you trying to sit with those girls? You have potential.” That was all she said to me. But I had remembered that maybe she was a bully or something. Then I got sent this picture of her, and she’s so cute — she doesn’t look like a bully at all. She’s just got this big smile on her face. But on the piece of paper that Miss Kunhart sent me, there’s this short essay Shameika had written on the top. And, man, it is amazing. It’s all about how she got put up to do this thing in church, in the service. And everybody was laughing because she was so cute and she messed up words or something. And she was so pissed. She was like, “They used me to bring the people in there, to think it was cute. They used me.” I was like, This little kid realized what the fuck was going on.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The full title of When the Pawn... is in reality a full-on poem Apple wrote in response to unfavorable reactions from readers of an unfavorable Spin magazine cover story about her.^{Full title} When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing 'Fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You'll Know That You're Right. Richard Harrington of The Washington Post called it "Apple's version of Chumbawamba's 'I get knocked down, but I get up again'" (aka their song "Tubthumbping"). As a result, upon its release When the Pawn... broke the record for longest album title at 444 characters. Chumbawamba themselves would later hold the record with 2008's The Boy Bands Have Won,^{Full title} The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or from Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won. whose full title contains 865 characters, nearly twice as many as When the Pawn...'s.
• Memetic Badass: Officer Barbrady holds her in high regard than Barbra Streisand.
  Barbrady: Well you ain't Fiona Apple and if you ain't Fiona Apple, I don't give a Rat's Ass.
• Nightmare Fuel: Her performance of Elvis Costello's Obsession Song extraordinaire I Want You.
• Signature Song: Criminal remains arguably her most famous song.
• Tear Jerker: In 2012, because her beloved pitbull Janet was dying, Fiona elected to cancel a string of concerts in South America. Not even her most embittered detractors could hold the tears back once they had finished reading her letter of apology.

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