I grew up listening to Fiona Apple; by the time When the Pawn… came out in 1999 I was ready to latch onto the lush and raw-hearted recriminations of it. I was young enough listening to her music that it got into my skin and my bones and my veins, at that age when we are such sponges for influence, when the happenstance of a person or an artist or an album or a song can write the map of who we will be for the rest of our lives. The frenzy around Apple’s new album has to do with its unprecedented genius, but also with the critical mass of adults who also grew up feeling this way. I was partially formed by Apple’s earlier music, and so were many of the artists my age or younger whom I now listen to with equal obsessive devotion. We are living in a lucky time of collision, a saturation of influences, the past speaking to the present so rapidly that the two meld into one layered version of time and culture.