The two sides of Fiona Apple

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Fiona Apple, Jurassic 5, 8 p.m. Saturday, Paramount Ballroom (sold out; 206-628-0888).

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Considering the talentless teen centerfolds who have rocked music sales this past year - Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, 'N Sync - the concept of a teen artist writing her own music sounds too good to be true.

Fiona Apple was doing it when she was 17. There was no manager who built and branded a teen image to sell to the world, no dream team of producers and songwriters to make her album. Apple recorded a demo independently and her talent was rewarded with a recording contract. There's the other Fiona, too - Miss Heart of Darkness, the trash-talking tantrum thrower. But at least when she says dumb things, they're her own dumb things.

In fact, the 22-year-old singer's childhood was the antithesis of the Mickey Mouse Club manufacturing plant that synthesized Spears and Aguilera; it could have been a psychoanalytic model of dysfunction. Apple's parents separated when she was 4, and she grew up with her mother in New York City. From the age of 8 on, she was in and out of therapy. She hated the sessions so much that she would wear a bra over her shirt and three socks on one foot just to provoke her counselors. Kids used to call her Dog because of her long, messy hair. She was raped by a stranger outside her mother's apartment when she was 12.

High school wasn't any better. She went to private school as a freshman, then public school her sophomore year, night school as a junior and finally dropped out her senior year.

She realized the only thing she could do was make music. Music was how Apple had always dealt with her anger and isolation. She learned to play the piano when she was 8 and used it to bang out her frustrations.

By her early teens, she had moved from classical piano to teaching herself jazz harmony by going through a collection of Tin Pan Alley songs from the 1920s. Her lyrics were developed through letters she would write to the people around her during her childhood and teenage years.

After she dropped out of high school, her father, who lived in L.A., encouraged her to make a recording. She made a four-song demo tape in three days for $1,500 and made 78 copies. A friend who babysat for Katherin Schenker - a publicist who represents Sting and the Smashing Pumpkins - passed along one of Apple's recordings. Schenker was impressed enough to send the tape to Andy Slater, the L.A.-based producer and manager who had worked with Don Henley and Lenny Kravitz. Apple was offered a contract with WORK group, a label under Sony.

Although her first album was lumped with the Lilith Fair femmes, "Tidal" was far from a carbon copy of Tori Amos or Alanis Morissette. She's neither a fairy queen nor a banshee. "Tidal" was filled with world-weary torch songs sung by a sultry alto. Her songs agonize about relationships. In "Sullen Girl" she sings about her rape: "They don't know I used to sail the deep and tranquil sea but he washed me ashore and he took my pearl and left an empty shell of me."

And despite its insipid title - scrawled in response to a negative Spin profile in 1997 - her follow-up album, "When the Pawn . . .," is even better than "Tidal." Since its release last November, the album has sold 600,000 copies. The songs blend what she picked up from Tin Pan Alley with late-'60s Beatles. Orchestra and keyboard effects are worked into the piano ballads. The lyrics tell of rocky relationships, power struggles, contradictions and mood swings. She's a man-eater in "Limp" when she sings, "Call me crazy, hold me down, make me cry, get off now, baby." In "Love Ridden," she's a woman admitting it's over when she offers, "I want your warm, but it will only make me colder when it's over, so I can't tonight, baby."

The album is the work of someone pushing herself. And someone who appears to have become more cognizant of her relentless vie en noir. In "On the Bound," she sings, "It's true I do imbue my blue unto myself. I make it bitter."

In this case, bitter is still better. Better than a Genie-Baby-Hit-Me-One-More-Time-In-A-Bottle-Cuz-It's-What-A-Girl-Wants bottle blonde.