“Now, when I listen to your shit, I hear similarities. I actually wanted to work with him [Jon Brion] so I could be like the rap version of you. That was one of my main goals. The albums that inspired me for Late Registration were your first one, Tidal, and Portishead’s Dummy, but especially your lyrics and how you sing. How is your vocabulary so ill? Were you tight in vocabulary in your school?”

—Kanye West to Fiona Apple, Interview Magazine, October 2005

Fight songs rarely take dreaming as a subject. Dream songs rarely put up a fight. To dream and to fight more often seem opposed. When you mix them, you arrive at reality. Many of us fight against all odds for our dreams. Fiona Apple knows that. “Sleep to Dream” is waking.

In the devotional music of my life, which is the discography of Fiona Apple, “Sleep to Dream” is the opening psalm, a struck match, genesis. It is the first track on her 1996 triple-platinum debut, Tidal, which turns 20 this weekend. When Sony asked Fiona to produce a more obvious single, she wrote “Criminal” in less than an hour and for many that song defines her. I never really listen to that one outside of karaoke backrooms. “Sleep to Dream” is the Tidal track that made me. It is a self-activating thesis for Fiona’s radical self-reliance:

I got my feet on the ground and I don’t go to sleep to dream

You got your head in the clouds and you’re not at all what you seem.

This mind, this body and this voice cannot be stifled by your deviant ways

So don’t forget what I told you, don’t come around

I got my own hell to raise

There is a rumble first. Deep, quaking. All bass and space. It rattles the core. The power of “Sleep to Dream” is foundational. Fiona is not asking for a little respect; she insists on a lot, rips it into her deserving hands. “Sleep to Dream” is reportedly the first lyric that Fiona ever penned. She was 14. She sounds not slightly evil, a storm simmering, about to thunder from the skies. Fiona once said that “if you just made something, you should fucking feel like you’ve got nothing left in you,” and even then she had buckets of life to pour in. (Her parents divorced young; she was taunted by classmates; at 12, she was raped outside of her mother’s apartment; she developed an eating disorder.) As a child, Fiona used a knife to carve the word “STRONG” into her closet. She tattooed “FHW,” an acronym for “Fiona Has Wings,” onto her back. Her language always cuts to marrow. “Sleep to Dream” gave me wings, too. It is about getting ready to fly.

“Sleep to Dream” is a song vehemently against fragile egos. Fiona corners a person who is at once uncaring and too sensitive, who is a liar and overly defensive, who is a space cadet and also apparently living under a rock. A deceiving fool. A dull tool. Judas, basically. Should that not be enough, Fiona boils it all down, too: “Don’t even show me your face cause it’s a crying shame.” GTFO.