Despite a charged campaign on the internet against her record label Epic, who fans claimed were blocking Fiona Apple from releasing her third album Extraordinary Machine, the singer has revealed that it was in fact her who was holding it back.

In 2004 eleven new Fiona Apple songs became available on the internet, leaked by an unknown source. Claims that these songs were the finished version of Apple’s new album and were being blocked from release by Epic because they felt they weren’t commercial enough sparked the Free Fiona campaign, which saw fans protesting outside Sony Music’s (Epic parent company) headquarters.

”I started feeling guilty,” Apple told Entertainment Weekly, “because it wasn’t the truth. The album hadn’t really been shelved. What was I going to do, tell all these people to stop?”

The recordings that appeared on the internet actually dated back to spring 2002 when she and producer Jon Brion (with whom she had also worked on her 1999 album When The Pawn…) went into the studio to start work on new material, though the singer not completely happy with recording again.

“Every now and then [Brion would] ask, ‘Are you writing anything?’” she says on her official website, “and I’d say no and change the subject. And then one time he was like, ‘I think enough is enough-for you and for me, I want to work on something again.’”

“Because I was kind of cajoled into doing it, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” she says. “I started feeling panicky, like do I want to do this at all, be a part of this again? So I kind of mentally checked out of those sessions. I felt really bad because I wasn’t really there to captain the ship. I didn’t feel capable of doing it. So I left Jon to make all the decisions, and as a result it became more of a Jon Brion record.”

After those sessions ended Apple gave the demos to another producer, Mike Elizondo and asked him to see what he could come up with. Delighted with his results she went to her record label to ask for more money to re-record the album, at which they balked and, according to the singer (Sony and Epic dispute this), told her she would only be allowed to record one song at a time and submit it to them for approval.

At this point she decided to give it all up and do something else. Telling her manager to inform Sony that she would no longer be recording anything at all she prepared to start a whole new life. She got as far as applying for an internship with an organization that does occupational therapy with children but much of her time away was actually spent sitting in front of the TV in her mother’s Manhattan apartment.

This is where she was when her manager phoned to tell her about the Free Fiona protest.

She told Rolling Stone, “I said, ‘Mama, they’re so organized and they care so much. They don’t even realize I’m sitting here watching Columbo in my bathrobe!’ I’m so in awe of people who care that much about anything that they organize like that, and I think it has to be known that it actually works. This whole thing gives me a great deal of enthusiasm for not just my job but for the way that life works.”

Though the protest was, as it turns out, a little mis-targetted, it did spark both Fiona and Epic’s interest in the album again and in June this year she and Elizondo (better know for his work with Dr Dre) finally completed work on Extraordinary Machine, which was released in October.

Two songs, including the album’s title track, remain from the original Jon Brion session but the rest has been completely reworked (both to the delight and dismay of fans) and the commercial version is the album Fiona Apple wanted to make all along.

“I’ve had a surprisingly Zen feeling about this whole thing,” she says. “I kind of always knew that it would work out somehow.”