Every Single Night

This ode to self-imprisonment and internal conflict was the first single from Fiona Apple's 2012 album The Idler Wheel..., her first since Extraordinary Machine in 2005. The song is a remarkably intimate look into the battle that goes on in Apple's head. Introverted and extremely sensitive, she spends a lot of time with her own thoughts. Here, she provides rather vivid imagery of what it's like: the ideas trickle down her spine, swell to a blaze in her belly and crawl beneath her skin. And it happens every single night. Apple's songs are a visceral expression of her feelings, so there's no doubt she was writing about what she endured. And while this nightly fight with her brain sounds horrifying, she makes it clear she'd rather face it head-on than repress it. "I just want to feel everything," she repeats in the chorus.

When she wrote the song, Apple was living in Los Angeles, a strange place for an intensely private person who shuns celebrity culture. She didn't drive and rarely went out. When she did perform, it was at a small club called Largo, where she felt comfortable enough to go on stage. When Apple sang "Every Single Night" and a few other songs at a pair of concerts at South By Southwest in March 2012, it marked her first performances outside of Los Angeles in over five years. Why did she stay in LA so long? Her dog was sick, and she didn't want to move her.

Apple began recording new material for The Idler Wheel… in the late 2000s, keeping her sessions secret, even from her label, Epic Records. She opted to produce the album with her touring drummer, Charley Drayton, rather than her longtime collaborator Jon Brion. Executives at Epic only discovered that Apple had recorded an album in early 2012, when she presented it to them.