A free Fiona returns

Fiona Apple sat bolt upright, her hands clenched on the table in front of her, her pale green eyes darting nervously back and forth.

No, the notoriously volatile singer-songwriter wasn’t having one of her meltdowns. She was just using body language to illustrate how her approach to life has changed.

“Before, I’m kind of like this,� she said as she maintained her tense posture. Then she eased back slowly and luxuriantly into her chair in the lobby of a posh Santa Monica hotel. “Right now, I’m kind of like this. I’m riding with the waves a little bit more now instead of trying to control them.�

Given the tumultuous saga of her new album “Extraordinary Machine,� which comes out Tuesday on Epic Records, the last thing you’d expect to find right now is a relaxed, “more solid� Fiona Apple. But there she was, animated but easygoing during an afternoon interview this week.

That’s good news and bad news for her unusually fervent fans, who dote on her like a fragile sibling but also are drawn to her mercurial nature, her public outspokenness, the raw-nerves emotion of her quirky, confessional pop-cabaret music.

Apple, 28, has had plenty of time for psychological makeover. It’s been six years since her last album, “When the Pawn ... ,� a period of pure rest and relaxation followed by a high drama involving creative disorientation and conflicts between art and commerce, with a cast of characters that included record producers, label executives and activist fans who organized a “Free Fiona� campaign.

It got so bad at one point that Apple actually quit.

“I was just standing in my kitchen, and I called up my manager and I said, ‘OK just tell them I’m not gonna record anymore,’ � Apple said. “ ‘Don’t call me back, I’m gonna unplug my phone because I’ll doubt what I do if you give me five seconds to doubt it ‘ I walked over to my friend’s house and went, ‘OK, I just quit.... I feel great, it’s done.’ �

Apple’s post-�Pawn� period had begun more placidly, with the singer taking a long break after completing her touring for the 1999 album. Eventually, her friend and producer Jon Brion persuaded her to start work on a new album, even though Apple wasn’t sure the songs she’d been developing were ready to be recorded.

They had some tracks to play for Epic executives in mid-2003. Brion said at the time that the label rejected them as uncommercial, comments that sparked the fans’ grass-roots campaign to get the record released. But Apple, who remained silent during the controversy, says now that she was uneasy with the music.

“For some reason my brain stopped working at a certain point, and I wasn’t able to pick out what I liked or didn’t like,� she said this week. “I had no idea what I wanted, because I think that I wasn’t ready to do it again, and I think that I just shut down....

“I didn’t know the songs well enough when we started to record them, so I just wasn’t able to be the captain. And as a result it just got a little bit confused and the songs got away from me.�

Things stayed in limbo for a while, then Apple started redoing the songs with producer Mike Elizondo, a Dr. Dre associate. His simpler approach brought the work into focus for her, but then she was slapped in the face by word from Epic that they could record only one song at a time, with the label checking up on each one.

It was an insulting restriction to put on an established, free-flying artist, and that’s when Apple quit, disappearing for several months until media coverage of the “Free Fiona� drive and the leak of the Brion recordings to the Internet and radio created a little leverage for her.

Though relations with Epic were restored (Apple says she later learned that the one-track-at-a-time order was a miscommunication) it still took some doing to get her back in the studio. She says if it weren’t for her friend Brian Kehew, who promised to participate and is credited as a co-producer, there might have been no “Extraordinary Machine.�

“Even then I was feeling ... ‘I don’t need this, I’m gonna go do something else with my life,’ � Apple said with a flash of the old fire. Why step back in the ... quicksand again?�

In the sun-dappled lobby, Apple seemed to be glad that she had. She’s proud of the album, whose songs focus on romantic conflict and breakup -- she said that after reviews started appearing she called her ex-boyfriend, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, and assure him that they weren’t all about him.

But there’s also the closing “Waltz (Better Than Fine),� which she says is “all about the importance of doing nothing,� and the title song, a manifesto of self-reliance directed at “people in my life that just are worried about me a little bit too much.�

So what did the singer learn about herself and her art from the album ordeal?

“I’m not gonna sit here and say, ‘Well next time I’m gonna wait till I’m ready.’ Because it was all worth it.... I’m happy that I wasn’t ready and that we made those recordings and that I went through all that stuff, I’m happy that I got the opportunity to make a decision like ‘OK I quit,’ and to know that faced with a decision like that I went the right way -- not for my career but for myself.

“I’m glad that I got to see that if you do things for the right reason, pretty much most of the time things turn out the right way. And even if they don’t turn out exactly how you want them, you still feel good about yourself.�