Big Feelings Are Here to Stay
When I was younger, I was fed the same message as many others; teenage girls are dramatic. They have big, unjustified, over the top feelings that could be released at any moment. I was then made aware that I would too, against my will, become one of those teenage girls that cried and cared about trivial things. But I shouldn’t worry as I, and all the other immature teenage girls with their frivolous feelings would mature and become women, who didn’t have many big feelings at all.
But then I became a teenager and realized that I loved having big feelings. I loved singing my heart out to love songs and loved crying to breakup songs. I loved writing in my journal when things felt like they were the end of the world, and I loved looking back and realizing that they weren't. I soon then began to fear growing up and mourned the loss of when I would lose the ability to feel big feelings and mellow out. I mean, women over the age of 30 not having big feelings was a fact to me. All the songs I heard on the radio were about teenage romance and an intensity equated with being young.
That changed when I discovered Fiona Apple’s 2020 Album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters. This album changed the way I feel about aging. At 45 years old, Apple sings of life, love, pain, and everything in between with such intensity, 7 year old me would have thought she was one of those over dramatic teenage girls.
In Fetch The Bolt Cutters, Fiona Apple is breaking free of the chains that silenced her throughout her life, letting all her big emotions rein free. She confronts her childhood bullies, lovers that spoke over her, and displays her anger towards rapists and their apologists. Apple also sings specifically to other women, sharing the connection she feels to an abusive lover’s new lover on “Newspaper” knowing what she might be going through, and on “Ladies”, where she fights the notion that we all must hate the women who date your ex next because as Apple says, “nobody can replace anybody else/so it would be a shame to make a comparison”.
These songs revealed parts of life that I didn’t realize anyone could sing about. These were feelings that I believed were buried deep within and no one spoke about them, let alone sang about them. Fiona Apple was releasing feelings I didn't know I had into the open and putting them into words.
But the most important songs on this album to me, and my three favourite songs, are the songs about love and the stages around it. Because desire, longing, heartbreak, and everything in between are the emotions I originally began to mourn when I believed that becoming a woman would mellow me out. Hearing “Cosmonauts” for the first time, (and subsequently “I want you to love me” and “Drumset”) changed that. On “Cosmonauts”, Apple sings about growing up in a relationship, how difficult it can be to love someone, but how intensely you continue to do so anyways. “When you resist me hun/I cease to exist because/I only like the way I look when looking through your eyes”, was the most beautiful lyric I think I had ever heard and completely changed how I viewed aging. It gave me hope for a life that I was scared to live. I didn't have to grow out of these big feelings I had, currently have, and will continue have. I can continue to feel love so hard, and loss even harder. I can continue to be angry at the world and the shit that it brings. I can have complicated feelings about marriage, and being a women, and living in the patriarchy, and it doesn't have to be so clear cut. And if love goes wrong at age 45 for me, I can love again. And it will be beautiful.
The thesis of this album is simple. It is “I won’t shut up”, and that is exactly why it is such an important album. While 45 is nowhere near geriatric, in a world that chains up and silences the aging women, Fiona Apple brings the bolt cutters. Women’s voices, and their big feelings are important, and they are here to stay.
Illustration: Jena Williams
