Fetch The Bolt Cutters

Bolt cutters are used to cut through locks or fencing; in this song, they're a metaphor for freeing yourself from your mental and emotional shackles. "It's about breaking out of whatever prison you've allowed yourself to live in, whether you built that prison for yourself or whether it was built around you and you just accepted it," she explained to Vulture. "The message in the whole record is just: Fetch the f--king bolt cutters and get yourself out of the situation that you're in - whatever it is that you don't like."

This is the title track to Fiona Apple's first album since The Idler Wheel... was released eight years earlier. The delay isn't unusual - the album before that came out in 2005. Apple got the phrase "fetch the bolt cutters" from a 2013 episode of the British TV series The Fall, where Gillian Anderson's character says the phrase in a scene where she's trying to break into a room to free a young girl.

Apple looks back on her childhood traumas in this song before declaring she's moving past them: Fetch the bolt cutters I've been in here too long Growing up, she lived in New York City with her mother and older sister. In school, she didn't fit in and was often ridiculed for being weird. Her classmates had no idea she was writing songs that whole time and had a wellspring of musical talent. In the lyric, she sings about some of her coping mechanisms for dealing with the ridicule, like trying to make friends with her tormentors. None of it worked, but looking back she can see their approval shouldn't have mattered anyway - her bullies were among the hoards who "don't know s--t."