Fiona Apple doesn’t seem to be a natural performer, though she is comfortable at the piano.Jack Plunkett/The Associated Press
As the people walked into the auditorium at Exhibition Place, a vintage radio play was heard instead of the warm-up music. Drama, then, at the Fiona Apple show.
News was made recently when a fan upset the fragile singer-songwriter at a concert in Portland. "Fiona! Get healthy! We want to see you in 10 years," someone from the balcony yelled. A verbal altercation ensued. It ended in tears.
We do wish to see Apple in 10 years, and more. But her health is not our concern.
Attired in velvety shorts, fishnet stockings and a T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves, the 36-year-old singer appeared gaunt and devilish. At her side – and this is important – was Blake Mills, a young California producer-guitarist who has worked with Jenny Lewis, Lucinda Williams, Norah Jones and Lana Del Rey. The dynamic between the co-headliners Apple and Mills was the attraction of the evening; their mostly unspoken interplay was soulful, subtle and watchable.
They began with Tipple, an easygoing folk-rock duet that twinkled and imagined Nickel Creek wondering where Cockburn's lions were. As the crowd more than respectfully applauded, Apple naturally applied a fresh coat of lipstick on her mouth.
Next was a limber and noisily jazzed The First Taste, from Apple's debut album from 1996, Tidal. In her glum contralto, she sang about retiring to bed early, "waiting for the black to replace my blue."
There's a rawness to Apple; her wires are live. On Every Single Night, from her acclaimed 2012 LP The Idler Wheel…, she sang that she was what she was because she does what she does – a bit of Popeye-meets-Descartes style philosophy.
At times she called to mind a feral Sarah Slean or, on the country-flecked material, a wilder Norah Jones. Once, between songs she exhaled audibly and then growled. "The sound of weakness and the sound of fake strength," she guessed, psychoanalyzing in the moment. She doesn't seem to be a natural performer, though she is comfortable at the piano (where she went occasionally). What she does seems to be something between exercise and exorcism.
Mills, the bearded counterbalance and co-conspirator, brought soothing alt-roots music here and played rugged bursts of jazz noise there. Occasionally he played a kick drum, sang and strummed simultaneously. Apple joined in on harmony and struck a big bass drum with a mallet. They were backed usually but not always by an unflashy drummer and a charismatic double-bassist.
A new song (possibly titled I Want You to Love Me, and rough around the edges) featured Mills noodling and droning on guitar as Apple made the moaned-blues titular request. She sang the country-soul dickens out of Conway Twitty's It's Only Make Believe, while Mills added glassy slide guitar riffs.
It was not unusual for Apple to writhe as she stood on one foot or the other. It was if she were balancing on something narrow that only she could see. And perhaps she was doing just that.
Brad Wheeler