In this month’s Ye-covered GQ, there’s a piece on the 21 albums from the 21st century that every man should hear. It’s relatively inarguable, with some slight recency biases.

While I was happy to see Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine (coming in at the end at 21), GQ made a mistake in their writeup for that record. That mistake? Directing customers to the commercially available version.

Maybe GQ has some no-piracy-endorsements rule. I’d guess that’s the case. The blurb does mention that there were issues with her record label. Unfortunately, though, the best version of that album is slowly being whitewashed out of history.

Every year or so, I meet someone who doesn’t know this story. So, I take to making sure that not only they get a copy of the version I testify on behalf of today, but know who to blame.

In 2005, as I was starting my senior year at Bard College, I finally “got into” Fiona Apple. It happened through the leak of an album entitled Extraordinary Machines, which was produced by Jon Brion (who I was then fawning over for the soundtrack for Eternal Sunshine).

I got the album thanks to an on-campus file sharing network called DC++. Those were the glory days of file sharing. Albums downloaded in seconds. TV episodes took mere minutes. It would take longer to get your chicken tenders wrap at the campus cafe than it did to download an entire movie franchise.

So, we were all spoiled by this technology, and it led to one of my first Too Much Content moments. I didn’t know where to begin. A number of albums and movies fell by the wayside, to be consumed after college ended. Possibly because of the high regard my peers held Fiona Apple in, I gave the album a sense of immediacy, and in that first listen, I became converted.

The album shined through a variety of textures and levels. Delicate when it needs to be, and hammering at other moments. The amount of soul and emotion rendered in that forty-seven minute album rendered me speechless, until I realized I had to tell everyone about it.

To this day, I’ve got my iPhone synced with iTunes so that it’s always available. It truly deserves a spot on this big list.

Unfortunately, as much as I recommend this record to this very day, it’s not available for sale.

The leak wasn’t as radio friendly as her record label (EPIC/SONY) wanted it to be, and it was sent back for revision. The record that did see the light of day isn’t plastered with Brion’s name. It bears the name Mike Elizondo instead.

If you recognize the name Mike Elizondo, and you’re a Fiona Apple fan, you know this doesn’t make sense. Elizondo’s the uninteresting beatsmith behind many of the songs on Encore, Eminem’s worst album of all time.

Why SONY/EPIC brought Elizondo in, I will never know. It had been six years since Fiona released When the Pawn…, so maybe they had lost patience, and wanted to bring someone in who had no standards, but instead a drive to ship the album. A fixer, if you will. Someone to clean up the investment the studio had placed in the album, and make sure it was ended to their liking.

If you compare the Jon Brion version, though, you’ll realize that the studio’s tastes and beliefs about their liking were worthless. A great singular album was brought down to the day’s tastes and standards. What was an album that could stand the test of time then became a blip in the mid 00's trajectory.