Fiona Apple Unveils New Song ‘Werewolf’

Fiona Apple staked out a local elementary school to get the sounds of kids yelling and playing for ‘Werewolf,’ a new song from her upcoming album, ‘The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do.’

The song hit the web today, and it’s a quiet piano ballad with the unexpected sound of screaming voices two minutes in. Apple tells Pitchfork the screaming was inspired by her initial recording of the song, which took place at her mom’s house in Harlem. As she was singing, she heard screaming sounds coming from a movie on a nearby television, and she decided to try to mimic that noise for the track, an effort that proved to be more difficult than she thought.

“I spent literally the next year trying to re-create that sound,” she says. “I went to San Francisco for Halloween and I was hanging out in trolleys recording people screaming. I would walk past a bunch of drunk people and be like: ‘Hey, scream!’ But it would always sound wrong and stupid.”

Finally, one morning she heard kids playing across the street from her house in L.A., and she raced outside with a recording device. “I ran out, half-clothed, carrying my recording thing. I was standing there looking like a crazy person, watching these kids. They were jumping with balloons between their legs, trying to make them pop. In the actual song, we had to take out all the balloon pops because they sounded like gunshots. But it was so perfect.”

‘The Idler Wheel…,’ Apple’s first album in seven years, drops on June 19. Fans have already heard the first taste from the record, ‘Every Single Night.’

Listen to Fiona Apple’s ‘Werewolf’

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