Left Alone

Fiona Apple’s full album title is The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, which tells you something about the album’s relationship to restraint. The record is stripped to percussion, piano, and voice — no guitars, no bass, minimal production — and “Left Alone” is where this spareness becomes most devastating.

The song is about abandonment fear in its most fundamental form: not the fear of a specific person leaving but the terror that the capacity for being left is permanent, constitutional, woven into who you are. Apple’s vocal begins with the controlled intensity of someone who has rehearsed the feeling for years and still cannot manage it, and it deteriorates — deliberately, artfully, with the skilled performer’s ability to simulate loss of control while maintaining it.

The percussion that Amy Aileen Wood provides throughout The Idler Wheel is proprioceptive — you feel it as much as hear it, the rhythms working on the body before they reach the mind. In “Left Alone,” the percussion builds as the lyric builds, the physical sensation of the song matching its emotional content: mounting, pressing, unavoidable.

“How can I ask anyone to love me / When all I do is beg to be left alone?”

The paradox at the song’s center — wanting closeness, fearing it, using the fear to create the condition you fear — is familiar to anyone who has loved anxiously. Apple does not solve this paradox. She inhabits it for five minutes and fifty-two seconds with such specificity and such skill that listeners who recognize themselves in it feel genuinely seen.

The Idler Wheel won no major awards. It was named album of the year by several critics who knew what they were hearing. “Left Alone” is why those critics were right.