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About

Genius Annotation

Track #4 on Fiona Apple’s fourth studio album The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do.

While chatting with Interview Magazine, Fiona explained that the song is named after Jonathan Ames, the American author and screenwriter she dated:

I did that because Jonathan likes his name to be spoken. He pisses me off in so many ways, but I’m still very close with him. I felt like he deserves to have a song with his name in it.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Fiona added:

I had come to New York for three months to write and to take a visual perception class at the New School. I was at the piano and I started writing a musical piece that reminded me of Jonathan because he is so extreme in some ways. He is just so hilariously quiet on a day-to-day basis, but when he’s on stage or excited with a group of people, he’s just embarrassingly bombastic. So I was like, “Hey, I’m writing this music and it reminds me of you,” and he was like, “Does it have my name in it?” I thought, “I’ll do that for him.” But then we broke up.

About the song’s instrumentation, Fiona told Pitchfork:

On the first night of recording with Charley Drayton, we walked by this bottle-making factory. The door was open and you could hear a machine running. We both had our recorders with us and we agreed that the sound would be good for the song “Jonathan”. Juan, the guy working the night shift at the factory, let us walk through and record the sound of the machine.

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