Fiona Apple’s Survival Guide to Isolation

In that introduction lies the paradox of Apple’s alienation. She beats her own path and fences people out, and still, she hungers for others. Indeed, the cloister of Fetch the Bolt Cutters is somehow packed with visions of humans other than Apple. There’s Shameika, Apple’s intimidating middle-school classmate, who gets her due on the album’s magnificently thrashing second track. There are men who treat their own wives “like less than a guest,” or who kick Apple under the table during pretentious dinner parties. And there are women—“Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies!” as Apple drawls with fake lasciviousness—struggling with the same social-sexual riddles that she has. From each story she extracts theories about her own failings and triumphs. No one is a rival so much as a fellow warrior, to whom extending empathy provides Apple with a helpful lesson. Jealousy and resentment, Apple says in various ways, are the true enemy.

Are these characters living, breathing people in Apple’s life? Most of her sketches are executed with a leer, suggesting distance. On “Newspaper,” she addresses the new girlfriend of her ex. The sad spectacle of seeing him mistreat her the way he mistreated Apple “makes me feel close to you / It’s not what it’s supposed to do,” she sings in a hypnotic, bluesy melody. The song’s title and noir feel hint that Apple is observing the relationships from afar, in paparazzi shots. Similarly, in “For Her”—a gutting, jagged choral sculpture—she trills out vividly feminist poetry inspired by other women’s #MeToo stories, including the one Dr. Christine Blasey Ford told on national TV. With fearsome urgency, Apple is reaching out to people whom she may only know through screens.

This act of reaching, of humanistic projection, ennobles Apple’s lonerism. As she’s long known—and as millions of cooped-up people are now learning—a retreat from the world can translate to a renewed, and ideally clarifying, obsession with that world. Is it not true that right now, as individual lives have gotten smaller, people are more attuned to the big picture? Happy hours are gone and press conferences of global consequence have flooded in. Casual acquaintances have disappeared; lasting friendships have rekindled from afar. To call these developments the silver linings to a crisis isn’t right. They are simply the way that people must cope with living apart. Apple, at least, seems to gain succor and creative inspiration from pining for only the most nourishing kind of connection. “I want you to use it!” she shouts on the opening song, presumably addressing her listeners. “Blast the music! Bang it, bite it, use it!”

Fetch the Bolt Cutters, accordingly, is an album for blasting-banging usage. If the sense of perfect composition that marked her old albums is not quite here, it’s been replaced by astonishingly vivacious moments, stories, and sounds. Left to her own devices, with what feels like endless time, Apple has rewritten her own biography in terms of a wider social struggle: a breakthrough enabled simply by the power of the mind. Yet also, she seems to say, music and life need not be quantified in terms of breakthroughs—narrative expansion, forward momentum—at all. In rippling chants on the closing track, “On I Go,” she revels in the way that she’s become untethered from any rat race: “Now / I only move to move.” To rethink the meaning of one’s confines is a crucial survival tactic, and collaboratively doing so might even be a way of thriving.

Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers pop culture and music.