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What grabbed my attention was a voice I hadn’t heard for some years: Fiona Apple, American chanteuse best known for her 1996 debut album “Tidal” and its 59-word-titled followup “When The Pawn…” (we’ll save you the rest). Noted the title of the song being played, thinking to listen to it again, as both her ripped albums lurk in my MP3 collection. But the track (“Red Red Red”) wasn’t there.

Odd: it can’t be off her third album, because Ms Apple hasn’t released one. But Google the song title, and a much more interesting story emerges. It turns out she has done a third album, titled “Extraordinary Machine”, which was completed in May 2003. Recorded, produced, done, dusted. All it needed was the nod from the people at Sony for the CD presses to roll.

They didn’t. The album “was quickly shelved by the sad corporate drones over at Sony because they didn’t ‘hear a single’ and because it doesn’t sound exactly like Norah Jones and because they’re, well, corporate drones,” wrote Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sony wanted something more like her earlier stuff. But she wasn’t writing that stuff any more. Impasse.