New York ? When Fiona Apple first heard about the Web site freefiona.com, she remembers feeling flattered, overwhelmed – and guilty.

That’s because while fans were mounting an ambitious Internet campaign on her behalf, accusing Apple’s record company of squashing a brilliant album because it wasn’t commercial enough, she didn’t want to see “Extraordinary Machine” released either – at least not the version widely circulating on the Web.

“I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted,” she says of “Extraordinary Machine,” which was finally released Tuesday after a monthslong saga that cast Apple as an artist being subjugated by her powerful record label, Epic Records, a division of Sony Music.

The truth was murkier.

Though Apple claims Sony didn’t like the original version of the album because they didn’t hear any hits on it, she was dissatisfied with it, too, for other reasons.

“I kind of checked out. I wasn’t there to be the captain of the ship and say how I wanted things to be musically,” she says.

The album initially was produced by longtime friend and producer Jon Brion, who had worked on her best-selling, groundbreaking debut album, 1996’s “Tidal,” and its follow-up, 1999’s “When the Pawn.”

Singer Fiona Apple has released a new album, Extraordinary

“In this case, I don’t know what was going on in my head so much – trepidation about what was ahead of me, a lack of confidence, I don’t know what it was,” she says.

Apple hadn’t even been pushing to record an album. The singer-songwriter, who lives in Venice, Calif., was happily living out of the spotlight, burned by her previous brush with celebrity.

“I tried to leave my own little bubble as little as possible,” says the still-waifish 28-year-old Apple.

After “When the Pawn,” she would perform occasionally with Brion, and write a little bit, but for the most part, she was living a “very easy, workless life.”

Brion was the one who nudged her out of her bubble. After she confided to him that she had been writing songs, he pushed for her to go into the studio.

“He wanted to get to work, and I could understand that. And I knew that I kind of needed a kick … and didn’t know what else I was going to do,” Apple admits.

But then she sat back and let Brion take over, unable to come up with a grand artistic plan all her own. As the pair came to the end of the recording sessions, Apple knew one thing: She wasn’t happy.

So she reached out to Mike Elizondo, perhaps best known for his hip-hop production with 50 Cent and other top acts. Elizondo previously was approached by both Brion and Apple to work on the project, and Apple thought Elizondo could give her the direction she badly needed.

But according to Apple, Sony was hesitant to bankroll that new direction. Apple was told she would have to work on one song at a time and let the company hear each one before it would go further, she says.

Epic spokeswoman Lois Najarian denies this.

“I really did want to redo the songs,” she remembers. “(But) I thought that it was at the cost of my integrity.”

So she quit. Then, a few months later, she got word that someone had posted an early Brion version of the record on the Internet; freefiona.com emerged, decrying Sony for not releasing it.

After the issue caught the mainstream media’s attention and became a rallying cry on the Internet, Apple says Sony told her that she could do whatever she wanted with the album.

Now, with the Elizondo version finally released, Apple is excited again – ready to embrace life outside her bubble and excited to be back at work with her music again.

And she credits freefiona.com for helping her get to that point.