A World-Weary Fiona Apple

It was hard not to feel a bit uncomfortable on Tuesday at the Troubadour as 18-year-old Fiona Apple sultrily gathered her long hair on top of her head and sang such lines as “I’ve been a bad, bad girl.”

It would be one thing if the bare-midriffed singer were just another teen tease parroting words of her elders, or another Alanis Morissette feeling the first flower of sexual and social independence. The image Tuesday, though, was closer to Lolita, but as sung by Marlene Dietrich--husky-voiced world-weariness infused with enough romantic remorse and regret for someone twice or even three times her age.

You couldn’t help hoping somehow that she’d made all this up, that she’d learned these things from books and from the old torch singers who obviously influenced her. But in the first of her two sets Tuesday--the New Yorker’s first U.S. concert appearance, and only her sixth overall--Apple convinced that it was all-too-real experience behind her songs. As one of her titles puts it, “the child is gone.”

The child was there when she spoke, nervous and a little giggly, between songs. But even then she talked of mistrust and hurt. And as disturbing as that may be, it was equally compelling.

Much credit goes to her supporting musicians, who combined with Apple’s piano to create a hypnotic, noir mood. But the songs on Apple’s impressive debut album, “Tidal,” especially the striking “Criminal,” come packed with sophistication bespeaking true talent and vision--the voice not of innocence lost, but of a world where innocence doesn’t even exist to be lost.