Musical Analysis #1: Apple by The Narcissist Cookbook

Before I get into my analysis of this song, I would like to encourage you to listen to it first, without knowing anything about it. It's the only true way to experience this song, in my opinion. To know what's happening before you hear it yourself is to ruin the entire messaging of the song. Here is the link to hear the complete song: Apple by The Narcissist Cookbook - 2018, UK.

image credit: swizzle on tumblr

So, with that in mind, and the hope that you've listened to it already, let's get into the nitty gritty of it all.

Lyrics

Like many songs by The Narcissist Cookbook, the lyrics of this song are less sung and more spoken, more closely resembling poetry than actual lyrics. And this is shown through the first half of the song, with no actual instruments being heard, only the voice of our narrator, the chirping of birds, and a deep subtle sound of wind. This opening, though pushing the boundaries of what is traditionally a "song", is already enough to bring about the emotions I associate so heavily with this piece. I remember so vividly the first time I heard this song, the cries it wrung from deep within myself, the grief and hope it conjured as one, encouraging me to rethink everything I thought I knew about the religious upbringing I had and my relationship to it. For the first two minutes of the song, we are hearing what seems to be a one-sided conversation, between our narrator and an unnamed second party, with the narrator talking about the garden they both live in, how perfect each day is, and whether that means it was ever really perfect, if the next is even "more" perfect. The narrator talks about "it," though we don't know who or what "it" is, just that it is what put the narrator and their companion in this supposedly perfect garden, and that the narrator believes they are "its" toys, so to speak, "garden gnomes" is the phrasing they used. Eventually, the narrator starts to use an apple in the garden as an example of what they are, content and blissful so long as they do what "it" put them here to do, that to go against what "it" wants is to sentence yourself to death, but that despite that you will continue on through the apple seed. And this is when the narrator reveals who they have been talking to this whole time, asking a simple question, "Do you know what a seed is, Eve?" 

Harmonic Texture

It's over 3 minutes into the song where we get the first actual instrument being played. It starts with a quick strum of a guitar to emphasize the narrator's words, a simple homophonic texture. But other sounds quickly join in, a bass’s deep notes and higher short, staccato notes from a guitar start playing, giving the music more depth and nuance as the narrator starts to explain the depth and nuance of Eve’s situation, that she is like an apple, with seeds inside of her that will "sprout into a brand new person, a child in her image but entirely separate." The short staccato notes start to increase in pitch while becoming longer and more drawn out, to indicate and emphasize the hope and positive side of Eve eating the apple, that her children will be smarter than her and that that is what “it’s” afraid of, Eve’s “child being smarter than you [Eve], and their children being smarter than them, each generation smarter than the last.”

    The narrator acknowledges to Eve that Yes, her descendants will die if she does this, but the background rhythm returns to what it was when it initially began, the sound that’s trying to convince you that this is okay, hopeful, good even, and the narrator is becoming more impassioned and frantic and insistent sounding, that yes they will get old, they will get sick, and they will die, but in the process Eve’s descendants will discover “mathematics, philosophy, electricity, democracy, gravitational waves, solar power, wind power, power chords, Reese's mini Peanut butter cups” The narrator becomes even more frantic and impassioned as they describe what Eve’s descendants could do and discover, the music, ironically, gets slower and more drawn out but is distinctly building to something, which ends up being the lyrics following “Reese’s mini peanut butter cups” where the narrator starts getting more frantic about Eve’s descendants looking for evidence of God, and the music goes back to how it was before, the short staccato with repeated up/down/up half step sequences but quieter, and a new element comes into play, vocal interjections meant to sound like the angels of heaven, to indicate that the descendants are trying to find them, but the angels get abruptly cut off as soon as the lyrics indicate that the descendants failed to find proof of God (“hoping to find God’s initials inscribed on the inside” still has the angels but once the narrator says “Instead they’ll find…” the angels are suddenly gone, immediately) and once the narrator finishes the initial sentence indicating proof of God was not found, the background music, and that same staccato note sequence, gets more intense again, more impactful. The narrator finishes what Eve’s descendants could achieve with “all Its dark materials laid out neatly on the workshop table, waiting to be discovered!” and then the music starts to lower its intensity again.

    The narrator then lowers his voice, clearly exhausted after his impassioned speech, and says with a breath, “Or”, and then tries again, much calmer and quieter, “Or, the apple stays where it is… Nothing ever dies and nothing ever changes, just that one apple on that one tree forever. And I'm not saying that it’s a bad thing, necessarily,” and the music fully cuts out after that, the bird chirps returning, and the narrator starts to almost whisper, “it is a beautiful tree. Maybe even the most beautiful tree but… it is not perfect… and I’m starting to think… maybe God can’t see the things that I can see…” and then the narrator is silent, and we’re left with just the birds chirping around us, and a choice left to make.

    Parsing out what this song is meant to mean, versus the meaning I've personally put onto it after finding that it spoke to me in a very unique way, was rather difficult, but the artist has many posts on his Tumblr blog about the song that I used to find his and my own meaning, along with the Genius lyrics page.

Sources:

Johnston, Matt. The Narcissist Cookbook Tumblr Embassy, Tumblr, 2020, https://narcissistcookbook.tumblr.com/search/apple. Accessed 2024.

“The Narcissist Cookbook – Apple.” Genius, Genius, 2018, genius.com/The-narcissist-cookbook-apple-lyrics.