Photo by Benjamin Lozovsky

There is a certain masochism to being a diehard Fiona Apple fan. It means learning to love at a different tempo than the fans of other musicians; it requires a three-to-seven-year commitment to a promise she never actually made. Waiting for new songs without ever knowing if you’re waiting on anything at all, for sure, is the primary act of FA fandom. Another Fiona record is never guaranteed us, as well-read fans know that Fiona claims she’ll never write again after finishing an album.

-=-=-=-But such is most fandom: stupid. Stupid like when I was 20, on a Megabus to see Fiona in Washington, D.C. for her "hype tour" ahead of The Idler Wheel’s release and I googled her, and the first results were "Fiona Apple cancels D.C. concert due to illness." Of course, my next attempt met a similar end, this time owing to my illness, my undergrad-requisite bout of mono and its forced decision between spending what meager energy I had on driving to Atlanta for the show or finishing my midterms. I kept the ticket—intangible as it was, being an email and all—and left my seat in Atlanta unoccupied because, somehow, that felt honorable.

After my two disastrous attempts to see Fiona, I began to wade through YouTube searches of each concert as it happened—figuring that if I couldn’t see Fiona Apple, I could at least trail her music and movement from afar.

In commemoration of The Idler Wheel’s three year anniversary and in lieu of a new album, the following playlist provides a sort of salve for the Fiona fan’s long-suffering wait for new material—a palliative immersion in the bootleg recordings of Fiona Apple. The videos represent the very best recordings of Fiona’s live performances from an archive compiled in the years since the tours. I mention all of this because dashed hopes are a universal aspect of idolizing Fiona Apple; thus, fans have the need to continue to find novel interests in a years-old album. The playlist below provides one means of doing so, enlivening old tracks in exciting ways and offering viewers new vantage points from which to view their icon, new points of focus to tide us over for a while/ever.

1. "Sleep to Dream" at the Vegoose Festival (2006)

This is the siren struck with divine madness. Fiona displays her voice as instrument, but one that convulses when blown—and Lord, does she blow, just barely getting out the "I’ve got my own hell to raise" line before devolving into indecipherable squalling. Her screams continue, but at this point Fiona—twirling the microphone like a baton—puts the mic back on its stand, so that she can proceed to Fiona-dance to the instrumentation, but soon retreats behind the piano, where she appears to hide out.