New Song of the Day #43: Fiona Apple "Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)"

A protest song, and a return to form.

I’ve been a bit slow on New Song of the Day posts lately, but I need to ramp back up. There’s no shortage of worthy tracks, as my latest new music playlist documents.

Among those tracks was Fiona Apple’s hauntingly world-weary cover of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.”

She’s been slowly emerging from years of relative silence since her 2020 pandemic cri de cœur Fetch The Bolt Cutters. There was a collaboration last year with Iron & Wine and recently, another with Mike Scott of the Waterboys — a brilliantly brutal reading of his “Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend” for his Dennis Hopper rock opera. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

Yesterday, Apple dropped another new recording, an original song of her own. It’s quite different from Neil’s “Heart of Gold,” even if it’s searching for a kindred humanity. It’s a sort of fife-and-drum march that makes its case about inhumane pretrial detention practices with exactingly well-reasoned lyrics, unspooling a narrative that could be a daily newspaper op-ed piece if not for the f-bombs.

Here’s a statement from Apple about “Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)”:

"I was a court watcher for over two years. In that time, I took notes on thousands of bond hearings. Time and time again, I listened as people were taken away and put in jail, for no other reason than that they couldn’t afford to buy their way free. It was particularly hard to hear mothers and caretakers get taken away from the people who depend on them. For the past five years, I have been volunteering with the Free Black Mamas DMV bailout, and I have been lucky to be able to witness the stories of women who fought for and won their freedom with the tireless and loving support of the leadership. I hope that this song, and the images shared with me, can help to show what is at stake when someone is kept in pretrial detention. I give this song in friendship and respect to all who have experienced the pain of pretrial detention and to the women of the group’s leadership who have taught me so much and whom I truly love."

Artists, activists, politicians and policy-makers do different things with different tools. But change requires everyone to play a role, and in this hyper-mediated age, with elected officials discharging their legislative duties via social media performances, I have zero problem with “performers” pitching in on policy-making. I applaud it; it’s necessary. We all need to use our voices at this particular moment to effect political change.

Speaking of Neil Young, I still feel a chill when I hear the song “Ohio,” about the students shot dead by national guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970, for the crime of protesting the Vietnam War. (The 55th anniversary of the incident was this week.) “Ohio” is a paradigm of a protest song, and its power endures. Below is a live recording of a solo performance from 1971 (the video seems patchworked, but the audio is pristeen).

“Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)” may, or may not, stand the test of time song-wise, as “Ohio” did. What matters now is its attempt to help women caught up in our politicized and increasingly-unaccountable court system.

For more info on the anti-bail movement, visit LetHerGoHome.org Among other information, you’ll find a brief, illuminating video — very worth your time — of Apple discussing her years of work as a court-watcher. She knows what she’s talking about here. Listen up.