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PHOTOS: Fiona Apple and Blake Mills at Tower, 6/27
Fiona Apple said we cheered her up.
PHOTOS: Fiona Apple and Blake Mills at Tower, 6/27
Fiona Apple played the Tower last night to a crowd of extremely devoted fans. My boyfriend went along with me and observed in the intermission after an opening set by guitarist Blake Mills that it seemed like a lot of the men there were in his shoes—no particular opinion about Apple other than "Hey, 'Criminal' was a pretty good song," just there to accompany a female partner.
But when the lights went down and Apple came out, though the screams of the general crowd were definitely female-heavy, the occasional superfan yells of "WE LOVE YOU, FIONA" and "MARRY ME, FIONA" were from male voices as often as female ones. (One particular guy on the left cracked up the crowd with an enthusiastic "THAT WAS THE SHIT!" after "Daredevil," off her new album The Idler Wheel, and then cracked Apple herself up by howling a sincere "THANK YOU FOR PLAYING MY FAVORITE SONG!" into the quiet ending of (I believe) "Paper Bag."
One thing you can definitely say about Apple is that if she's sick of playing old hits like "Sleep to Dream," "Shadowboxer" and "Criminal" off her 1996 debut, Tidal, she does an admirable job of disguising it. (It probably helped that the crowd wasn't any less enthusiastic about songs off Extraordinary Machine and Idler Wheel than it was about her big radio hits.) She's an amazing stage presence that made me wish for a better camera lens—her wavy, sinewy body movements onstage don't vary that much, but the amazing faces she makes while singing and playing gave me serious camera envy of the dudes next to me with telephoto lenses who could actually capture them. One day.
The night ended in Apple's equivalent of an encore—Apple never plays the "OK, everyone keep applauding for five minutes and I'll come out again" games that have become standard—with a great slow-triple-groove cover of Conway Twitty's "It's Only Make Believe" with celesta and a sweet-ass slide guitar solo from Mills—a song which someone was kind enough to upload to youtube already:
Then she thanked the crowd for cheering her up and bounced. Here's some of those photos I shot, some of which went up on City Paper's Instagram last night. Did I mention our Instagram account? It's @phillycitypaper, and I'm having way too much fun with it. Be our friend.
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