''I felt like it wasn't my music that had gotten me there,'' she says today, ''and I felt very resentful of that and of myself for that. It had been so important to me to get to this point, to be in this crowd, and once I got there I saw it wasn't anything I could really feel proud of. I thought that even if I can't articulate what I'm feeling, if I don't get up and say what's on my mind then I never will. So when I finished I felt great. But you should have seen the cold shoulders I got backstage. It was the moment where I realized that I was in control and could say whatever I wanted to. That is not something that makes people you work with very comfortable.''
Another often-mentioned low point is Apple's public meltdown at New York's Roseland Ballroom during a February 2000 stop on her When the Pawn... tour. Complaining that she couldn't hear herself, she fled the stage mid-show in hysterical tears, and never returned. (At a makeup concert several months later, Apple apologized to the audience, saying ''You said you wanted me to be self-confessional; I thought you said selfish and unprofessional.'')
Sick of the public life (''I was cast in the crazy role and I was perfect for it''), heartbroken by how misunderstood she felt (''to feel hated is really, really awful''), Apple went back to Los Angeles and dropped out of the spotlight. When she and her boyfriend of three years, Magnolia director Paul Thomas Anderson, broke up in 2001, Apple moved out of his place into a house in Venice Beach. Other than a twin mattress in the living room that served as both bed and sofa, three dog pillows for her stray pit-bull mix Janet, a boom-box radio, and a TV monitor for videos, she left her house unfurnished for nearly two years. Tell her this sounds incredibly sad and lonely, and she says it wasn't really. ''I had so many other people's voices in my head that I just needed to take away everything.''
She took walks, she read plays, and she watched movies. But mostly Apple just sat in silence out on her lawn. ''You can call it a very long-drawn-out day-to-day meditation,'' she says. ''I went through a period where I had a razor blade and was carving things out of wood. I would just do that all day, sitting there and thinking.'' (Ask Apple if she was high as a kite out there on the grass and she laughs and says no. She admits to a short drug phase, when she smoked pot every day, but that was before this.) Friends needled her, saying she was wasting time and needed to get back to songwriting. ''And I would be like, 'No, this is exactly what I need to be doing right now.' I just had to sit there and figure the f--- out who I was. I didn't have an appetite for music in any way.''
Apple was ready to retire. But Jon Brion, who played many of the instruments on Tidal and produced When the Pawn..., who's worked with everyone from Kanye West to Rufus Wainwright, wasn't prepared to let that happen. ''This is one of my favorite artists alive,'' he says. ''She needs to be out there.'' Brion would casually check in about her work when they met for their weekly Tuesday lunch at Hal's, a restaurant in Venice. ''Most of the time,'' she remembers, ''it would just be as simple as 'Writin' anything?' 'Nope.''' They went on like this for a while, until Brion finally broke down in the spring of 2002 and told his friend that she simply couldn't give up on music. ''You should really, really, really, really do this,'' he remembers pleading. ''You really need to do this, because most other people suck.''
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