#365songs (91 / 365)

NOTE: I do not recognize "April Fool's Day" and this entry is not a joke.

I was a late arrival to Fiona Apple fandom — I heard "Criminal," of course, and probably "Paper Bag," and liked them but not enough to pique my curiosity further — but I fell hard for The Idler Wheel..., my #1 album of 2012. There are no skips on this album, but while its opener "Every Single Night" is pleasant and off-kilter enough to be intriguing, it was track 2, "Daredevil," where I started to realize it's really something special. It's all sparse but not bare-bones: "Daredevil" is just pattering percussion, barroom piano, a splash of acoustic guitar and Apple's inimitable voice, double-tracked in the chorus. But every one of those pieces nestles perfectly into the rocky soundscape, and they all fade into backdrop when Fiona Apple pushes her voice to its limit in the absolutely thrilling bridge. And the thing is that pretty much every song on the album is this good.