My algorithm knows what I want when I log onto social media: a whole lot of Apple—Fiona, that is. And on July 15, my Instagram feed became a full-on fireworks display of posts and fan-made reels spreading the good word about the latest from the singer-songwriter behind “Criminal” and “Paper Bag”: Six long years after her last album, Fetch The Bolt Cutters, Apple had released a new song, “Horns Of A Bull.” For a TV show. As it turns out, fans who have been dying to find more of her out in the world just haven’t been looking in the right place. And now every week, you can hear her on the coincidentally named Apple TV.
Before this announcement, I had shrugged off July’s television offerings as nothing worth interrupting my summer activities. But then I scrolled up on an interview clip of Anya Taylor-Joy promoting her miniseries Lucky, based on the 2021 Marissa Stapley novel of the same name. Taylor-Joy, smiling, confirmed, “Fiona Apple does our fucking title sequence!” Co-star Timothy Olyphant added, “This show must be awesome if Fiona Apple’s part of it.” Suddenly, Lucky had my attention—no small feat during an era when so much competes for it.
Check her track record, and it becomes clear that it’s not exactly rare for Apple to lend her songs to the small screen. For one thing, she appears to be a lover of televised storytelling herself—especially series with a strong female lead. After all, Fetch The Bolt Cutters and its title track got their name from a line in the Gillian Anderson-led crime drama The Fall. It’s a two-way street of creative motivation: TV inspires her work just as she inspires TV creators.
It also makes sense financially. Given the influence of streaming on artists’ ability to make a living from recordings alone, as well as Apple’s complicated history with touring—a primary source of revenue for most musicians—why wouldn’t she turn to song licensing, especially as a longtime Los Angeles resident with ties to the film and TV industry? (In Lucky’s case, Amy Aileen Wood, who drummed on and co-produced Fetch The Bolt Cutters with Apple, is married to co-showrunner Cassie Pappas.) It’s also an opportunity for her to contribute to causes she believes in, as when she donated her royalties from “Criminal” syncs in 2019 and 2020 to help fund refugee aid in the United States.
And while Apple is more inclined than most to pick up a call from a music supervisor—especially compared to the notoriously stingy likes of Led Zeppelin or the Prince estate—each new needle drop from her back catalog remains thrilling for a superfan like me. I imagine this is the case for any artist’s most passionate supporters—there’s always some fun in seeing how a favorite song is being used to express the themes, subject matter, or setting of a TV show or film. Often songs from Fiona’s existing catalog are used for projects because they perfectly fit the context—see “Heavy Balloon” in this week’s episode of Furious, “The First Taste” in the vampire series True Blood, or any of the “bad, bad girls,” including those of Hustlers and Yellowjackets, whose actions have been soundtracked by “Criminal.”
It can also be incredibly meaningful for the creators of these works to secure the rights to Apple’s music; as often as she’s said yes to this kind of thing, she doesn’t grant her blessing flippantly. Evan Rachel Wood and Kristen Stewart have both shared stories about writing letters to Apple requesting access to songs—Wood for her Fetch The Bolt Cutters-scored short film “Unauthorized” and Stewart for The Chronology Of Water—and being moved by Apple’s positive response.
She’s contributed covers to TV soundtracks (like her version of The Waterboys’ “The Whole Of The Moon,” heard on The Affair, for which she also did the opening theme) or an amusing co-write (she penned the lyrics to “New York Doesn’t Like Your Face” with David Lucky for the star-studded Apple TV cartoon Central Park). But not since the undulating “Container” was introducing the extramarital dalliances between Dominic West and Ruth Wilson in the 2010s has a bespoke Apple tune accompanied a series’ title sequence, as “Horns Of A Bull” does Lucky’s. For such an occasion, she takes cues from the script to tailor her song to the show’s specific themes. The chorus of “Container”—“I have only one thing to do and that’s / Be the wave that I am and then / Sink back into the ocean,” perfectly translates the force-of-nature experience and fleeting nature of a forbidden and torrid romance, even pulling off a bawdy pun by sometimes truncating the word “ocean,” leaving the song’s speaker instead sinking back “into the o-.”
In “Horns Of A Bull,” Apple pulls her images from Greek mythology to illustrate the complex parent/child relationship between Olyphant’s and Taylor-Joy’s characters. Taking the main character’s POV, it begins, “I pay attention to the men behind the curtain / I was born in the horns of a bull,” evoking the origin story of Athena, goddess of wisdom, who is said to have burst from her father Zeus’s forehead—Zeus who once became a bull to abduct Phoenician princess Europa. This suggests that Lucky, the character, has inherited both the brains and shape-shifting skills of her con-man father. The song fleshes out this character beyond what is shown in the series and lends a lovely interiority to her as it poses the question, “Who’s the one I’m gonna make proud? / And is it too late for it to be me?… Is it too late to be me?”
As has been the case ever since Mike Nichols voiced the baby boomer ennui of The Graduate through the music of Simon & Garfunkel—or, heck, since the Warner brothers paired selections from their deep musical holdings with the hijinks of animated cut-ups and called them Looney Tunes—the benefit here is mutual. Apple gets a new venue for her artistry; Lucky gets to say something about itself through that artistry, and attracts the curiosity of the Apple faithful in the process. Because if she saw fit to lend her songwriterly focus to Lucky’s inner world in song, far be it for the fans to forgo the series entirely. For those of us desiring more of Apple’s music, always, in any form, it’s exciting to know that these cross-media collaborations exist, that people whose job it is to populate TV shows and films with meaningful music seek out her songs and are likely fans like us. Examining her list of credits, we know exactly what she has been doing during these long breaks between albums—she has kept working, just behind the curtain.
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