On Sunday, Epic Records’ chairman and CEO L.A. Reid tweeted about the long awaited Fiona Apple album, writing, “Lots of good music coming from @Epic_Records in the next few weeks. Stay tuned music fans. Welcome back Fiona!” Apple, who hasn’t released any music since her 2005 album Extraordinary Machine, has been rumored to have an album’s worth of new material for quite sometime. The news spread over Twitter, with fans posting song lyrics from her earlier work and speculating about her new songs. “I’m so happy about this I could cry!!!” Perez Hilton gushed.
Fiona Apple album rumors aren’t always reliable — after all, Machine endured so many delays that fans started a “Free Fiona” campaign for its release — so I called Epic Records to find out if the announcement was actually correct. An Epic spokeswoman confirmed that Apple would definitely release a studio album in 2012 but she said that Reid’s tweets were “taken a little bit out of context” and that the tunes wouldn’t arrive next month. “It’ll absolutely be this year,” she said, “but timing wise, I don’t know exactly when.”