After a brief Internet-lead explosion of awareness, the movement to pursuade Sony to release Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine has slowed to a crawl. The bandwagon picked up some popular support -- short attention span bloggers, tech writers fancy to bash a major label, mainstream media writers who love a good controversy, an uninformed SF Chronicle columnist -- but is now back to a hardcore group of fans. The FreeFiona.com website doesn't look to have been updated since roughly January.

Where is the album? What's Fiona doing now?

Coolfer spent some time poking around the message board at FreeFiona.com. This post in particular gives some interesting information of the situation surrounding the unreleased album. Taken from a post at Aimee Mann's message board, this post says producer Jon Brion asked Fiona to record a new album with him as a kind of therapy after the end of his six-year relationship. Jon and Fiona paid for the recordings and Fiona "did the album under the knowledge that it may or may not be something the label would release." The post adds that Fiona has the option to buy out her contract and release the album elsewhere but had not chosen to do so. Other posters are skeptical about these claims.

There's some potentially conflicting information about Fiona's post-Extraordinar Machine studio work. One poster referenced this interview with Mike Elizondo in the January 2005 issue of Bass Player Magazine. "I’m producing Fiona Apple's next album, which we just started," he said. But a recent Entertainment Weekly, says a post at FionaApple.org, claims Fiona is "starting a second third album with producer Brian Kehew (Moog Cookbook)."

Much more about Fiona, her unreleased album, its implications about the music industry and what people expect out of a proper album...after the click.

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