So here's one for the other guys and their irational fear of female singers

Ok I'm wired, bored and have about 60mg of different legal chemicals pumping through my body...let's talk about Fiona Apple. Or more directly let's talk about her album Extrordinary Machine. It's a rare case and not many people paid attention to it. But they should have, there's lots of great songs on this anomally.

What's so different about this album is that there are two versions of this cd. The Jon Brion produced version that got scratched at the last moment and the actual album that got released. All but one of the songs are the same...in the sense of lyrical content and structure, but the executions are dramaticlly different.

A little background information. Jon Brion is a producer, composer, movie scorer guy. He does a lot of great work, most notably Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless mind. He's also been the producer on some of your favorite works by the Eels, Rufus Wainwright and I'm not positive but i think a couple of things Beck did. Anyway he has a total sound of his own and you, after listening to some of his work, pick out a track that he's worked on. There's this heavy string dominated sort of chugging orchestral feel to it. On Extrordinary Machine the orchestra swirls in and out all over the place. They dominate some of the songs and in some places it sounds like the singer and the background music are fighting for the dominante presence on each song. This really works for most of the songs. Especially "Not about Love" "Get Him Back" and "Not about Love". In these songs the fighting back and forth emphasises the anger, confusion and just raw emotion of the songs. She really seems to be standing on stage and the music is taking the place of whoever these songs are directed at....I'm looking at you Paul Thomas Anderson, look him up.

Anyway rambling on...So yeah Brion and Apple put together almost the entire album before the record label came down and said they didn't want to release it because there weren't any singles on it....aka what happened to Yankee Foxtrot Hotel by Wilco...So Apple took the time to go over the songs again. She decided she didn't really like all the mixes and that Brion had really taken the songs in a direction she wasn't pleased with. So in walks Mike Elizondo, who is....you guessed it Dr. Dre's protegee. Yes that's right Dr. Dre and Fiona Apple. Well it's not exactlly that. What Elizondo did was strip down the songs and put the vocals first on the tracks that needed it. What came out was really great sounding more Top 40 friendlly album. Which isn't really a bad thing, not that this album sold, I'm sure no one reading this has heard it.

Ok so what's the point of my jib jabbing to a bunch of people who don't exist. Well it's this. Producers matter. They change the whole direction of sound. They translate the bands ideas and live sounds into something formated and constucted. Radiohead call Nigel Godwritch (SP?) their th member( he's produced all their good albums). ruined the strokes and Regina Spektor in one year...I fucking hate that guy. So when you see one of your favorite bands has a new album comming out, check out who's producing it. Or go through your cd collection/scroll through your Ipod and check out who produced some of your favorite albums. You might have a couple producers pop up over and over again, maybe check out some of the work they did with bands you don't know. You might be pleasentlly surprised..... Ok it's football time....football football...so yeah have fun, write some comments so that we know someone is reading this shit. I talk to myself at night for hours, don't need to spend time writing to no one as well...assholes. Just kidding I love you fuckers.ut not enough to check my spelling or grammar.