‘Left Alone’: Fiona Apple’s most overlooked song
There’s no such thing as a straightforward Fiona Apple song. If the song’s structure or melody doesn’t appear to be complex on the surface of things, then you can guarantee she’ll make up for it with verbose lyrics that wind through different themes and emotions in serpentine fashion. On the flipside, if it isn’t lexically challenging, then that will equally be countered with all sorts of melodic acrobatics. Apple doesn’t operate by half-measures, and that’s one of the reasons why her discography always takes time for the next chapter to arrive, with her painstaking attention to detail forever being applied.
There are plenty of songs that deliver on both fronts, ducking and diving through intricate passages of piano playing and tongue-twisters, and these are often representative of Apple at her finest. From debut single ‘Shadowboxer’ to her latest masterpiece in Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Apple has always shown consistency in her artistry and has possessed a level of emotional and artistic maturity far beyond her years. If a teenager can write an album as stunning as Tidal and then continue to fire on all cylinders for the next 25 years, you know you’ve got a true visionary on your hands.
Her fourth album, The Idler Wheel…, may well be her most minimalistic album in terms of its bare-bones production, but at the same time, it has some of her most elaborate works on it. The songs are wrought with despair, anguish and a sense of inner turmoil, but the ways in which she presents these difficult emotions are poetic and achieved with an unmatched beauty. ‘Every Single Night’ sets the tone for the album with its delicate glockenspiel plinks and Apple grappling with her demons, and from this point onwards, you know you’re in for a sublime display of her most raw songwriting.
After a handful of stellar moments, we reach the album’s centrepoint, ‘Left Alone’, and it represents the most tumultuous moment of the record’s emotional arc. Everything is spilling out from within Apple’s crumbling mental state, as she narrates her racing thoughts in the aftermath of a seemingly messy separation. The tangled and warped barrage of flared-up emotions sees her deliver some of her finest wordplay, and brilliantly captures the hardships of navigating outbursts of self-hatred and isolation felt following a breakup, and even though the listener isn’t having to experience these emotions first-hand, they’re incredibly tough to stomach even as an onlooker.
From the opening lines of “you made your major overtures when you were a sure and orotund mutt / and I was still a dewey petal rather than a moribund slut” where Apple expands the vocabulary of her listeners with the world’s most eloquent paraphrasing of “you’re a bigheaded piece of shit and you destroyed me”, to the very matter-of-fact chorus of “how can I ask anyone to love me / when all I do is beg to be left alone”, we’re treated to Apple at her lyrical best at the expense of her being at her lowest point emotionally.
Musically, the song also constantly matches the mood of the lyrics. The unusual intervals between the notes in the rapidly repeating piano motif give off a feeling of chaos breaking out, perfectly representing how frenetic things are when thoughts and emotions are racing through the head. However, when tensions begin to rise with sustained piano chords in the pre-chorus, you can feel Apple getting ready to pour out her true feelings – “tears calcify in my tummy” being the line that represents this development – and then the lamentful chorus is the final declaration of her true feelings of wanting to be ‘left alone’.
There are so many other tremendous details in the song that seem not to get as much recognition as her other works, such as the way the vocal phrasing in the verses is different each time, also representing this inner turmoil. The pre-chorus vocal melody changes in every instance as well, demonstrating how she can wrangle a seemingly unlimited amount of ideas out of a simple chord sequence. It may not be her most beloved song, but it’s certainly a display of her ingenuity in all aspects of songwriting.
