Fiona Apple – When The Pawn... - Genius

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When the Pawn... Lyrics

This poem is the full title of Fiona Apple’s 1999 album, When the Pawn. It contains 90 words for a total of 400 characters of text. In 2006, Fiona explained the reason to use the poem as her second album’s… Read More When the pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a kingWhat he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fightAnd he'll win the whole thing 'fore he enters the ringThere's no body to batter when your mind is your mightSo when you go solo you hold your own handAnd remember that depth is the greatest of heightsAnd if you know where you stand then you know where to landAnd if you fall it won't matter 'cause you'll know that you're right7EmbedCancel

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AboutSong Bio2 contributors

This poem is the full title of Fiona Apple’s 1999 album, When the Pawn. It contains 90 words for a total of 400 characters of text. In 2006, Fiona explained the reason to use the poem as her second album’s title as follows:

When it came time to name the next album, I think it became kind of a joke because I feel silly about naming the albums because each song is its own little world to me and when you have ten you make an album. I thought that just using When The Pawn sounded kind of cool. And the cool thing about it is that I didn’t do this on purpose but I got so much crap for putting that 90-word thing. It stole the thunder of the actual album at first because they were like “Oh, god. She’s so annoying, she had to go and do a ninety-word album to get attention or something”. But I don’t care about what anybody says because it’s the coolest thing I’m in the Guinness book of world records.

She wrote it on a tour bus when she was feeling down about how she had been portrayed in a Spin magazine interview. In 2006, Fiona explains:

I’d been on the cover of Spin magazine [december 1997] and they really spun it to be like that I was a crazy little sad loose cannon girl. Very unlike me, I opened up the magazine and I was so stupid I looked at the letters that people wrote in and not one was good. It was all people talking about how annoying I was, how crazy – it was just terrible stuff. I got so sad but there was no way for me to curl up in a ball and die because we had to go out on the road. So I tried to give myself a little pep talk.

However, in October 2007 Soulwax released their remix album Most of the Remixes, which has 100 characters more in its title. This was later surpassed in 2008 by the Chumbawamba album The Boy Bands Have Won…, with its full title containing 865 characters of text.

The full title/poem is printed as an overlay on the album cover.

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