Fiona Apple’s Perfect 10

The Pitchfork Review

Pitchfork

Music, Music Commentary, Music Interviews, Music History

3.3 • 844 Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2020

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters isn’t just the best album of 2020, it’s the sort of masterpiece that defines an entire era. On this episode, Pitchfork Editor Puja Patel is joined by Contributing Editor Jenn Pelly, who wrote Pitchfork’s 10 Fetch the Bolt Cutters review and spent the year in communication with Apple for a series of follow-up pieces, and Features Editor Ryan Dombal, who wrote Pitchfork’s previous 10 review a decade ago—for Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy—and worked closely with Pelly on her Apple coverage. The three discuss the brilliance of Fetch the Bolt Cutters, and Apple’s unorthodox approach to making it; as well as the process of deciding that an album should receive a perfect score, and what a 10 really means.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Pitchfork Review. I'm Pooja Patel, the editor of Pitchfork. Today we're talking about
0:08.1	Pitchfork's album of the year, which was also the first album in a decade to receive a perfect
0:13.4	10 from the site. That is, of course, Fiona Apple's incredible Fetch the Bolt Cutters.
0:20.0	I've waited many years.
0:22.6	Every print I left upon the track has led me here.
0:27.5	To talk about the album, why it succeeded, how it was made, and the legacy of the
0:31.9	Pitchfork 10.
0:33.2	I'm joined by Pitchfork's Features Editor Ryan Dauble, and contributing editor Jen Pelly.
0:38.7	Hello.
0:39.4	How's it going?
0:40.2	So Jen wrote the review of the album and has also spent nearly five months chatting with Fiona for a pair of features this year.
0:47.0	And Ryan is a longtime editor at Pitchfork who worked with Jen on those stories.
0:51.5	And he coincidentally also wrote the site's last review to get a 10.
0:55.4	And that was Kanye's My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy. So Ryan, you've been at pitchwork for a very
1:02.0	long time. And even still, there have been almost no tens given out during your tenure. And maybe
1:08.8	this is obvious, but for those who may not know, when we're
1:12.2	talking about a 10, we're really talking about the highest possible score, a perfect album in
1:18.6	Pitchworks Mind. They're incredibly rare and reserved for albums that we believe are singular and
1:23.8	groundbreaking. They're sonically innovative and forward-thinking. The caliber of songwriting on the
1:30.5	album is extremely strong. And they kind of uniquely speak to or capture a particular moment in history.
1:38.1	Actually, Ryan, maybe you could give us a quick rundown of, let's say, the more contemporary
1:43.6	albums that I've gotten a
	...

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