During her sabbatical, she said, she would often sit in her backyard in Venice, Calif., thinking and playing with pine cones. "I was making little pine-cone people with razor blades," Ms. Apple said, raking her fingers through her wavy brown hair. "That's all I did."

Her inertia did not sit well with some in her immediate circle. They accused Ms. Apple of being lazy, crazy and unproductive, she said. "It really hurt a couple of close relationships of mine," said Ms. Apple, who split with her boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson, the film director, three years ago. "It infuriated me because they couldn't believe that when I'm sitting and thinking that's how I work."

Several years ago she decided that she was ready to begin recording again and called on Jon Brion, who produced "When the Pawn. ..." Their collaboration, while smooth before, was shaky this time. "Jon would play me stuff and I wouldn't be able to tell what I liked and what I didn't like," Ms. Apple said. After emerging from a deep funk, she eventually decided to rerecord her songs with the producer Mike Elizondo, who has worked with Dr. Dre.

According to Ms. Apple, things were going well until executives at Sony began asking her to submit individual songs for their approval. Only then would they determine how much more recording money she would receive. Sony had already sunk nearly $800,000 into recording the original version of "Extraordinary Machine."

"They basically wanted me to audition my songs," Ms. Apple said, visibly offended.