Vicissitudes of pop.

Where is Fiona Apple? She was once a big thing, but she hasn't released an album in six years. Here's a VH-1 report:

Apple's third record, Extraordinary Machine, completed in May 2003, has been gathering dust on Sony's shelves, according to Jon Brion, the album's producer. Label executives allegedly don't consider it commercial enough for release, and thus a long and mostly uneventful silence has followed....

She was once annoyingly everywhere, super-commercial. Now, perhaps she's an artist, oppressed. Who knows? Maybe it's just a crappy record. Well, check out Free Fiona.

"The record company wants 'Criminal' junior and Fiona doesn't offer that up," Brion said. "She wrote that stuff when she was 16 and she's now in her mid-20s. She's extremely intelligent and writes this beautiful, really emotionally involved stuff that's very musical — lots of chord changes, very involved melodies, intensely detailed lyrics. It's just not the obvious easy sell to them."

The link to the article was sent to me by my son Chris, who writes:

I've heard two leaked songs from the unreleased album, by the way, and I think they're both excellent (and I'm generally not a Fiona Apple fan). They're heavily Tom Waits influenced and jazzier than her other stuff.