Leave Me Alone is a witty response to the people who’ve tried to sand off Rapp’s rough edges. But it was born of real frustration.
Last March, she had just wrapped up a European tour, at the same time as the Mean Girls single Not My Fault gave her the biggest hit of her career so far. Suddenly, she was under pressure to follow it up.
“I was told that, basically, everybody wanted me to put a single out in the summer and an album in the fall,” she says.
“I started panicking. I was like, ‘Holy crap, how am I gonna do that?’, because I was really, really, really depressed last year. I was so overworked, and I was so run down. I didn’t have any time to get myself together.
“I was crying to my girlfriend about it, like, ‘I have no idea how I’m going to do this’. And she was literally like, ‘You don’t have to, and, by the way, you shouldn’t’.”
Rapp agreed with the advice but went to work regardless, a by-product of career insecurity and a need for approval.
“I was like, ‘This is what somebody’s asking of me, so I can’t not fulfil that, because that means I’m not working hard enough, and that means I don’t want it enough’.”
