Fiona Apple is the go-to songwriter for exorcising your romantic demons, ruing those you really liked, those who didn’t love you again, those you pushed away amid one more freefall of your personal design. She’s additionally the go-to singer for 3 studio comedy auteurs: Michael Showalter, Judd Apatow, and Paul Feig.
Apple’s songs have featured in three of their movies — Apple wrote the unique tune “Boring Instrument” for Apatow’s “This Is 40,” capturing a decades-long marriage at its breaking level. Elsewhere, her epic ball of romantic resignation “Cosmonauts,” off the 2020 album “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” was additionally initially meant for that movie. In the meantime, her traditional cabaret-inspired love tune “Paper Bag,” about having an excessive amount of emotional baggage to enter into a brand new relationship she needs “so dangerous, oh it kills,” featured in Feig’s “Bridesmaids” in a montage of Annie (Kristen Wiig) making cupcakes as a balm for her terminally single life. The tune now additionally options in director Showalter’s romantic drama “The Concept of You,” starring Anne Hathaway as Solène, an art-dealing divorcee in a tentative-turned-whirlwind romance with pop star Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine). And the lyrics to “Paper Bag” — the place Apple is “having a candy repair of a daydream of a boy whose actuality I knew was hopeless available” — genuinely converse to Solène’s present state of drifting singledom.
Apple is famously valuable about how her songs get integrated into films and TV, and when licensing music for tasks, she usually donates the royalties to charity. (Apple, who has not launched an album since “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” has largely since taken to social activism as a courtroom watcher.) She did present vocals for the “Lord of the Rings” TV sequence on Amazon in addition to the theme tune, “Container,” for Showtime’s “The Affair.”
Apple’s Hollywood connections on a private stage abound: She dated Paul Thomas Anderson (director of the “Paper Bag” music video and others) for years in addition to magician David Blaine and comic Louis C.Okay. However so hardly ever does her music present up onscreen. Her tune “Valentine,” about an inferiority complicated over one other girl and off the 2012 album “The Loafer Wheel,” appeared in a Season 2 episode of “Ladies,” additionally executive-produced by Judd Apatow. That present’s chronically looking predominant character, Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham), earlier that season opined to a weekend-long stand (Patrick Wilson) about desirous to “really feel all of it” identical to Apple says within the lead single, “Each Single Night time,” off the identical album.
In accordance with “The Concept of You” star Galitzine, Apple superfan Hathaway (clearly a lover of darkish chanteuses, as she was additionally seen in a viral paparazzi shot listening to Lana Del Rey on her iPhone) wished “Paper Bag” within the film. “Annie’s an enormous Fiona Apple fan and fought to have that tune within the film. So actually, I imply, Fiona owes her for this one, but it surely’s cool to see this resurgence,” the actor mentioned. Although, in keeping with Showalter, in an electronic mail with IndieWire, that’s not precisely the way it occurred.
“Paper Bag” comes into “The Concept of You” throughout Solène (Anne Hathaway) and Hayes Campbell’s (Nicholas Galitzine) first encounter after their Coachella meet cute. Solène is however three years out of a fairly rancorous divorce and certainly nonetheless feeling only a bit “too shaky to carry” (Apple’s phrases within the tune) for a brand new fling, with Hayes presumably being her first for the reason that breakup. He’s the frontman of a One Route-esque band referred to as August Moon who in all probability doesn’t know an excessive amount of about Apple when Solène name-drops her at a warehouse in Glendale, the place they’ve gone to take a look at extra artwork after Hayes purchased out her total gallery.
Solène introduces Hayes, who’s clearly already wooing her, to a portray referred to as “Unclose Me” by her artist buddy Sarah (the IRL painter is called Sarah Anne Johnson). They met in school, the place Solène knew they might be quick associates as a result of she was “blasting a Fiona Apple tune from her dorm room” (a traditional Apple inception story). Lower to Solène and Hayes again in her automobile, and he or she’s taking part in “Paper Bag” on the stereo, Hayes certainly listening to it for the primary time. Now we all know the place Solène’s daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin) bought her love for “aggressively proficient feminine singer/songwriters,” as she says within the movie’s first scene, i.e., this lady is most positively a Mitski fan, too.
In accordance with Showalter, “Initially the road was about Ani DiFranco. That’s what we shot, and for some time, we had Ani DiFranco’s wonderful tune, ‘Each Arms’ within the movie.” (DiFranco, in the event you want an grownup various refresh, is correct up there with Apple, PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Tori Amos because the Gen X goddesses.)
“Within the edit, we realized that we wished a barely extra mainstream artist/tune for this second but additionally that Ani DiFranco was a extra acceptable reference for somebody who’d been in school within the early-mid ’90s versus early 2000s,” mentioned Showalter (Solène is popping 40 within the movie, probably set pre-COVID across the time Robinne Lee’s 2017 novel got here out). “Fiona Apple’s album ‘When The Pawn’ got here out in 1999. It’s an ideal sort of album for Solène to have listened to in school. ‘Paper Bag’ is only a good, soulful, infectious tune. Anne got here in, and ADR’d the road ‘Fiona Apple’ to interchange ‘Ani DiFranco,’ and the remaining is historical past.”
Showalter added, “I’m an Ani DiFranco fan. The Ani DiFranco reference is one thing that I put within the script [by Jennifer Westfeldt]. Seems Anne loves Ani, too, and so it was no struggle in any respect to persuade me to make use of the tune ‘Each Arms,’ however we did attempt another Ani DiFranco songs, too. Most notably ‘Buildings & Bridges.’ However then I made a decision that Ani felt too folksy for the second and that we wanted one thing with just a little extra pop to it.”
It’s fascinating how largely male administrators (Showalter, Apatow, Feig) have integrated Apple’s work to such pointedly plot-driven impact — simply from private expertise, Apple tends to be the province of girls and homosexual males. Galitzine informed IndieWire his sister launched him to Fiona Apple, recognized most broadly for her brooding 1996 single of self-destruction, “Prison,” and the varied (and at instances equally self-destructive) controversial moments that adopted in her heightening fandom (like that MTV Awards speech the place she decried your complete music trade and in addition the world). And “Bridesmaids” and “The Concept of You” every focus on ladies in or nearing their 40s at a crossroads, which will also be mentioned for “This Is 40,” although that movie splits its time between the POVs of Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd as a flatlining married couple.
Who higher to inform a story of romantic ennui onscreen musically than Apple? Working off the Joni Mitchell custom of confessional songwriting, she has impressed a lot of as we speak’s “aggressively proficient feminine singer/songwriters” in her path towards lyrical honesty, from Mitski to King Princess (whom Apple has truly collaborated with). And even amid all these catchy August Moon earworms, “Paper Bag” emerges because the true banger of “The Concept of You,” as Apple watches the “dove of hope” start its “downward slope,” and Solène realizes she’s extra than simply “a large number that he don’t wanna clear up.” What if perhaps Hayes does?
“The Concept of You” is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.