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About

Genius Annotation

Track #6 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.

As Pitchfork pointed out, “Werewolf” is “a cathartic lyrical heave that prods your demons and demands you confront them.”

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

What did Fiona Apple say about "Werewolf"?
Genius Answer

Fiona told Pitchfork in a June 2012 intervew:

I wrote that song while staying at my mother’s apartment up in Harlem. Whenever there’s a TV, I put on Turner Classic Movies—I always have it on, while I sleep, whatever. I was recording myself doing the song for the first time, and a battle broke out in the movie that was playing. People were shooting and screaming. I liked it, but I couldn’t use it from the movie, so I spent literally the next year trying to recreate that sound. I went to San Francisco for Halloween and I was hanging out in trollies recording people screaming. I would walk past a bunch of drunk people and be like: “Hey, scream!” But it would always sound wrong and stupid. But on the first morning we were planning to record, I had just gotten out of the shower and I heard all these kids screaming– there’s an elementary school across from my house in L.A. I was like, “Oh shit, that’s it.” I threw on whatever was right there– which I didn’t realize at the time was a pair of pants that I was going to throw away because the ass was split– and I ran out, half-clothed, carrying my recording thing. I was standing there looking like a crazy person, watching these kids. They were jumping with balloons between their legs, trying to make them pop. In the actual song, we had to take out all the balloon pops because they sounded like gunshots. But it was so perfect.

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