Notes from Apple's core: on her latest album, Fiona pares down to a piano and painful honesty. (arts).

Fiona Apple shows up late for an interview with her excuse on a makeshift leash--a black-and-white wire-haired mongrel. Apple was walking through New York City's Central Park when she came across some police officers offering the abandoned dog to passers-by as. an alternative to the city pound.

"It's an adult dog and no one's going to take it and it would be done away with," she says in a nervous rush. "I feel like it's your fault if you know something might happen to that dog and you don't do something."

LOVE AND GLOVE TROUBLES

Apple, clearly, is a worrier. In the songs on her two albums--her second arrived November 9--she broods about guilt and responsibility, agonizes over why love goes wrong and who's to blame, and ricochets from anger to self-laceration. Settled on a couch, finally, to discuss her music, she seems fidgety, putting on and pulling off a pair of gloves as she speaks.

Now 22, Apple had started working on her first album, Tidal, when just 17. Its songs, including the 1996 hit single "Criminal," pondered the desires and choices that arrive with adolescence, and after its release, she was both praised for her frankness and mocked for her self-absorption. By the time she was old enough to vote, it had sold 2 million copies.

She didn't hold herself back. In interviews she revealed that one song, "Sullen Girl," was about getting raped when she was 12, and she mentioned her years of psychotherapy, her fears, and her compulsive rituals growing up in New York City. When she received the MTV Video Music Award for best new artist in 1997, she blurted out a speech that concluded, "It's just very stupid that I'm in this world." To some, the diatribe made her seem earnestly unpolished, an arty high school girl who had somehow landed in show business.

PRECOCIOUS TALENT

Yet her gawkiness ended at her music. Apple's sultry voice and troubled phrasing gave her songs a precocious gravity, and so did her piano-centered melodies, which harked back to standards and blues. While other musicians her age were learning basic guitar chords as the 1990s began, Apple immersed herself for a year in The Real Book, a collection of Tin Pan Alley songs, to teach herself jazz harmony after she gave up classical piano lessons.

Her new CD's title--a 90-word pep talk--does provide more evidence to those who consider her self-indulgent: When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King / What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight /And He'll Win the Whole Thing fore He Enters the Ring / There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might / So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand / And Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights / And if You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where to Land / And if You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You'll Know That You're Right.

ATTACKS IN THE PRESS

The screed, she says, was sparked by a derisive story and letters about her in Spin magazine. "I was crying, like, `This can't be happening, she recalls. "People are personally attacking me way too much. I am a good person, I've never done anything to hurt anyone, and this is not me that they're putting down. This is something that they've created."

And so, says Apple, "I needed to write something, the same way that I write songs, when I feel like I need to clarify something to make myself feel better. I didn't have a piano because I was on a bus, so I wrote a poem."

CONFIDENT SONGS

The pep-talk poem obviously worked. When the Pawn ... displays increasing musical confidence, a willingness to let songs crack open or take odd turns. "Fast as You Can," her new single, deftly signals its mood swings with tempo changes and unexpected passages ranging from blunt, hip-hop drumbeats to flutelike "Strawberry Fields" keyboards.

As always, though, Apple is enveloped in contradictions and ambivalence. In one song, she apologizes to people she's driven away. In another, she sees she should escape a relationship and yet can't force herself to break free.

"I haven't learned those lessons," Apple says. "I mean, I've learned them, but I'm not done with them. But at least it's a step to write it down."

In the end, the album's combination of painful, sometimes clumsy honesty and careful craftsmanship makes Apple sound as if she's growing up on the spot. And, traumas and all, she just may be starting to enjoy the process.