23rd May 2006
MP3 Versions of Fionna Apple’s ‘Extraordinary Machine’ More Extraordinary Than the CD?
Oh yeah, now I remember what I wanted to post.
As usual, I’m incredibly late to this story — six to nine months late or so, I guess. A year or so ago, like a lot of people at the time I found online the illegally released MP3 version of Fiona Apple’s long-shelved third album “Extraordinary Machine.” I downloaded the MP3s and fell in love with the album. Although I only noted it in my Links Blog at the time and not here on the main blog, I raved about the album to a lot of friends and listened to it incessently for weeks. Before that, I was barely aware of who Fiona Apple was (and I still don’t know her earlier music).
As a rule, I don’t like to pirate music, but since this album wasn’t available commercially at the time (owing to disagreements between Apple and Epic/Sony), I had little choice. (Wikipedia has the whole backstory, of course.)
Somewhere along the lines, however, I did a boneheaded thing and deleted my MP3s of the album (thinking, erroneously, that I had it backed up), and by then the pirate directory where I had found it was gone. But by then, Epic had also seen fit to release the album
But here’s the deal: they reworked most of the songs from the album, and I really like the MP3 version better. Anyone else agree? Better yet, does anyone else know where I can get copies of those earlier versions of the songs?
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The key element in this entire thing is Jon Brion. You’re looking for the Jon Brion (composer of scores for Eternal Sunshine, I Heart Huckabees, and producer of Kanye West’s newest album, among others) version of Extraordinary Machine - try putting that into torrent search machines or something like that. I have a copy on my computer as well, and I totally agree - Brion did a way better job.