Scared of Being Alone - Rose Fall - a Playlist by musicto

Music to Navigate A Life

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Her heart stopped beating. She floated… just above the ground. She couldn’t look down, couldn’t move. Her entire life had been leading to this moment, and the moment swept away the past. There was only the future now. He was the future, and the future was professing his undying love… his words were the most beautiful music she’d ever heard, and she knew that the music would last forever.

But... of course, no it wouldn’t. Because there’s barely a soul in the world that hasn’t been damaged by love. That’s just the way love is!

Deep in your innermost self, deep in your immortal soul. No… deeper than that! Deeper! Really, really deep. Beneath all your desires, all of the wishing, all that longing, the craving for riches, for fame, for world peace. Beneath all of that life-affirming stuff, there are things we tiny mortals find it so hard to live without.

Love, companionship, self-respect. We are gregarious. We find it difficult to be alone. We don’t like it, not for too long anyway. When we’re not in a relationship, that yearning desire for a companion can become almost physical; a great weight in the chest. It’s almost up there with the need for air, food, sleep. A thing of heroic dimensions indeed!

The one. The only one! The one you found despite the blood, the smoke, the despair. Despite the battle strategies gone awry. Despite the humiliating utter loneliness. And now… a sense of hyper-charged living, slow-mo moments, hair-trigger emotions.

Don’t want to lose him. Can’t live without him. Afraid of being alone - in that same way that millions of people are afraid of being alone, of living alone, a half-person; a stranded, shipwrecked, apocalypse!

Tell me what you think of me
I’ll burn the words into my skin
Don’t let me go, don’t let me go
I won’t make it alone

But, this song’s clearly about more than just being desperate for love and the fear of losing love. It’s also about uncertainty and insecurity. There’s a unifying theme - a fear of loneliness. Mono-phobia. Haha, I suppose the clue’s in the title!

Scared of Being Alone is a disarmingly stripped back, atmospheric, lo-fi, R&B pop song - with a soft intimate vocal and an understated daydream delivery. It’s a voice that treads a beautifully fine line between teenage fragility and R&B exuberance. Confessional in style, it’s like the singer’s singing about things that she obviously would not really want to talk about face to face.

“I was nervous! It’s extremely personal and I was worried about what the people in my life would think. Would they hate it? Would my honesty make me seem uncool or a little pathetic? There’s this fear of being emotionally unavailable; struggling to openly express love to the people that I care for. And, if you never tell them they’ll never know. I think it's the ultimate tragedy!

“I have so much respect for Drake. He was the first rapper I encountered who was so vulnerable and open in his lyrics. I'm obsessed with Billie Eilish. Both her lyrics and the intimacy she's able to capture when she sings are inspiring to me. I think early Ed Sheeran was basically an unfiltered stream of consciousness. Alessia Cara, Halsey, Maggie Rogers, Sara Bareilles, and Mary Lambert are all artists I love who I think are good at sharing themselves.”

Rose Fall was born in New York to Senegalese parents, studied communications at UNC, and is an author, foodie, and intern currently living in Los Angeles.

Her first novel was published in 2016, although she started writing fan-fiction aged eleven or twelve. “That's how I got my start in writing. I'd be reading a book or watching a show, and the story wouldn't go where I wanted it to, so I'd make up my own alternative ending. When I'm writing fiction I can make the world I wish I lived in, and putting that into the real world can help it actualise. Fiction allows you to think something into existence. It's basically magic.”

Young people feel things more deeply! We need them to document their experiences at the teenage barricades, their thoughts and feelings, their voyages of self-discovery. And in their stories, we can re-evaluate our own rites of passage.

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