my Mitski-based vanity project

an attempt to rank and say something meaningful about all fifty-five tracks on mitski albums. the rankings are strictly my own subjective thought, please feel free to disagree and tell me why i should like a certain song more or less. i'm not trying to be definitive, i'm just exploring

[mitski-monologues]

1. Your Best American Girl

Of course. This was first and easiest of all the decisions that went into this project. It was always going to begin here. Every single skill that Mitski exemplifies reaches its apex: her technical mastery over musical catharsis, her ability to wrench the painfully personal into the triumphantly universal, her composition and writing unified into one of the great love songs of the last decade. For a love song it remains, even as she turns and walks away from all she ever wanted, as she repeats the immutable reason why she cannot stay, as she states simply “don’t wait for me, I can’t come”. Contrary to her own assertion from Square, Mitski recounts a love that scorches; here she reminds us that love means agony and regret and heartrending honesty. Your Best American Girl is the best sort of love song, not borne of awestruck delusion and optimism, but one that recognizes just how much we risk and how much love costs.  

To me, the most important and heartbreaking line in the song comes between the two choruses, where she says simply “you’re the one, you’re all I ever wanted / I think I’ll regret  this”, before your tears and screams are carried away in the most exhilarating guitar riff, and I am driving away from my now ex-partner’s home, tears making it nearly impossible to see, with a deep-set fear that no one will ever love me as much as they did. It took me years to understand that you can both do everything right and still lose, that you can love someone more than you thought was possible and still be incapable of reaching them. It seems like a small and insignificant thing, that our mothers raised us differently, an obstacle that should be easily overcome by love’s all-encompassing fury. Love conquers all, right? The refrain “I do” carries an irrevocable connotation, but here Mitski uses it to say “no more”. She looks the pain of that statement in the face and embraces it, and he falls away. Sometimes, loving means acknowledging that this was never meant for me.  It was always going to end here.

[marisatomay]

having a sister is like girl what is your deal

[mitski-monologues]

7. Strawberry Blond

This one is different. From the first second, Strawberry Blond stands out; you’ve never quite heard anything like this before, and you weren’t expecting it here. Most of Mitski’s music is built on the hallowed ground of rock-n-roll, on the pantheon of electrical guitar, distortion, bass lines, drums. Or it is drawn overtop a delicate canvas of piano and violin, the classical instruments of elegance handled with the finest technique and skill. Even the recent expansion into the world of synthesizers and software-generated rhythms is not so surprising; it is the modern age after all, and it is only natural that an artist should use new tools to develop her craft. But still, there is something different about Strawberry Blond, even among the many oddities on Retired From Sad. The opening percussion is surprising, yes, but then the acoustic guitar. Then the flutes. And, most importantly, the voice. Mitski is an excellent technical vocalist, and she often varies between the powerful, the gentle, and the violent. But here, she flutters, charged with frantic anxiety.  Or to put it less gently, she trembles.

Strawberry Blond ventures into foreign territory, away from conservatory pianos and garage band amplifiers, into folk and flutes and fields. And it is a song about foreign-ness, about looking out the car window, watching your immigrant neighbourhood melt into featureless farmland. About leaving home, desperate to find belonging, hoping that you’ve found it with her. About black hair against brilliant, unforgiving blond.

Because above all, Strawberry Blond is a love song. It is a silent confession without expectation, knowing the outcome. It is unique because love is unique. It is anxious because love is anxious. And it is beautiful and painful and frenetic and mournful, because love does not ask what you are ready to feel before you feel it.

This one is different. You are insightful, compassionate, kind. You laugh in the passenger seat and I know that I am completely, utterly lost. You mention him again, and I know you well enough to understand. And I want to say ‘Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you. I owe you my joy and the light of all my mornings. Darling, I love everyone because I love you. Darling, I do not want a life that does not have you.’

Instead, I say nothing and keep driving.

[mitski-monologues]

7. Strawberry Blond

This one is different. From the first second, Strawberry Blond stands out; you’ve never quite heard anything like this before, and you weren’t expecting it here. Most of Mitski’s music is built on the hallowed ground of rock-n-roll, on the pantheon of electrical guitar, distortion, bass lines, drums. Or it is drawn overtop a delicate canvas of piano and violin, the classical instruments of elegance handled with the finest technique and skill. Even the recent expansion into the world of synthesizers and software-generated rhythms is not so surprising; it is the modern age after all, and it is only natural that an artist should use new tools to develop her craft. But still, there is something different about Strawberry Blond, even among the many oddities on Retired From Sad. The opening percussion is surprising, yes, but then the acoustic guitar. Then the flutes. And, most importantly, the voice. Mitski is an excellent technical vocalist, and she often varies between the powerful, the gentle, and the violent. But here, she flutters, charged with frantic anxiety.  Or to put it less gently, she trembles.

Strawberry Blond ventures into foreign territory, away from conservatory pianos and garage band amplifiers, into folk and flutes and fields. And it is a song about foreign-ness, about looking out the car window, watching your immigrant neighbourhood melt into featureless farmland. About leaving home, desperate to find belonging, hoping that you’ve found it with her. About black hair against brilliant, unforgiving blond.

Because above all, Strawberry Blond is a love song. It is a silent confession without expectation, knowing the outcome. It is unique because love is unique. It is anxious because love is anxious. And it is beautiful and painful and frenetic and mournful, because love does not ask what you are ready to feel before you feel it.

This one is different. You are insightful, compassionate, kind. You laugh in the passenger seat and I know that I am completely, utterly lost. You mention him again, and I know you well enough to understand. And I want to say ‘Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you. I owe you my joy and the light of all my mornings. Darling, I love everyone because I love you. Darling, I do not want a life that does not have you.’

Instead, I say nothing and keep driving.

[mitski-monologues]

“Francis Forever points to the only one who sees you, First Love illustrates the only one you hear.” god that’s so succinct and lovely

thank you! i haven’t been able to update this blog in ages b/c of school but I hope to catch up on it over the winter holiday maybe. thank you for reading and caring!

[mitski-monologues]

6. First Love / Late Spring

For me, it is impossible to separate First Love / Late Spring from the track it precedes, Francis Forever – they are the before and after of the same story. What happens when you love someone so much that it ruins you – and what happens when they leave you? But the thing about that sort of love is that it burns regardless, both the iron and the scar it leaves behind.  Francis Forever says “I don’t know what to do without you”; First Love says “One word from you and I would jump off of this ledge”. Francis Forever points to the only one who sees you, First Love illustrates the only one you hear. The same story reflected on two sides; where you cannot abide their presence, nor can you survive their absence. And this is the primary tension within this song; Mitski acknowledges that she should not stay here, “please hurry leave / I can’t breathe” but cannot bring herself to leave, “I don’t wanna go home yet”.  Obsessive love makes you crazy, it pushes you to act in ways you never otherwise would; to quote the Priest from Fleabag, “Love is awful, it’s painful, it’s frightening… it’s all any of us want, and it’s hell when we get there”.  Love burns, and we face the impossible choice to embrace the fire and let it consume or to retreat alone into the cold night.

The Priest says “love isn’t something weak people do”. I try to remember this when I feel as though my heart is going to tear itself from my chest, when visions of my love flash inescapably across my dreams, when I curse the fates that I had been given the ill fortune to meet someone who captured my entire being with every glance. Love made me feel fragile, that a single word from her could shatter me so completely still feels embarrassing, like I was a childish fool for caring so much about one person’s opinion. I thought that I should be stronger, Mitski cries that “wild women don’t get the blues”, we wrestle with the devastating consequences of our love. But childish or not, it takes enormous strength to be subjected to emotional and spiritual turmoil that reaches to the core of your being and come out the other side. I will get there one day, I promise myself. I will.

[mitski-monologues]

5. Francis Forever

Mitski has always had a tremendous way with her opening lines, in that she manages to illustrate the essence of the song to come in a single gloriously memorable one-liner. Very few surpass this one; “I don’t know what to do without you”. If you’re here, you can probably relate: when your entire world is centered around them, every action, word, and thought is relevant only in their view, your life becomes a performance for an audience of one and the quality of your existence hinges completely on each of their smallest reactions. When Mitski sings “I don’t think I can stand to be / where you don’t see me”, she says that nothing matters except for you, everything matters only because of you. (Another Lorde parallel - ”blow all my friendships / to sit in hell with you”). She portrays a relationship, at least this version of it, is obsession, overwhelming and inexorable, one that says “I miss you more than anything”.

Is Francis Forever a love song? That is how I have always imagined it; I do not know else to call something so all-consuming. Isn’t that what we want from a romantic relationship, to be as maniacally obsessed with your other as they are with you? And yes, I know that co-dependence is dangerous, that there is enormous risk in binding yourself to another so inextricably, that the two-person cyclone of passion and desire may fly apart with soul-rending violence. These are the relationships that can kill, main, and destroy, to enter them is to look at the one you want and say that a minute in their company is worth every wound and scar. Francis Forever says that she would abandon the whole world; Francis Forever says that autumn will always come.

A few months ago, the one I loved walked away from me. She walked away because I needed her, because everything mattered through her, because I missed her in every second. Because I wanted her to turn and finally see me, and when she did, she turned away. I cannot say that I blame her, when she says that this portrait of love is terrifying, that it is unhealthy and unrealistic and wrong, I think she might be right. But I do not know if I can conceive of love in any other way. I loved her to the exclusion of nearly everything else, I loved her with every wayward thought and gaze, I loved her when I knew in my heart that there was only one way it would end. I am still picking up my pieces, trying to remember what made it all worth it but needing this summer to fade away forever. Still, if you’re reading this, I miss you more than anything.  

[mitski-monologues]

4. Townie

In the early portion of Melodrama, Lorde’s life-defining Bildungsroman, the brilliant virtuoso evokes the ill-advised hedonism of youth; car crashes, alcohol-induced passion, languid summer sex. But the lurid glow is completely and achingly drowned out by overwhelming desire; the midnight sheen of Homemade Dynamite fading into the understated obsession of The Louvre. Townie calls to mind the same feeling, whirling through bad decisions and transient flirtations, somehow also suggesting a drunk driving incident. But Mitski is more cynical, her car crash is not scattered with the sparkle that Lorde ascribes but portrays only an abrupt death. Mitski is a tremendous poetic lyricist and here she intentionally holds back, allowing the mundanity of the description to remove the sheen; I dare you to find anything sexy in “Smell that, it's wet grass, and smoke in my hair / I think I've had enough / But he wants a finale and I came prepared / And we're not going back”. And to be completely frank, I have never been the source of much male attention at parties, which I would like to attribute to gender presentation but is just because I never went much. But regardless of my personal lack of experience, the toxic allure of male desire is one of the overarching themes in Mitski’s work; surely it is better to be wanted, but when “they keep coming on for more, more, more” no matter what you give them, the Romance seems oh so far away.

Townie is, like many of her best works, primarily about wanting love, destructive love, chaotic love, love that pursues, love that threatens, love that finally satisfies despite everything it costs. I grew up being told that love is patient and kind but god I felt so viscerally alive than when I was chasing a high that I knew would ruin me. My father is a good man who loves me and wants me to thrive and I am desperate still to turn my back on all of it, to quote the unmatchable Donna Tartt, to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name. Townie is a song about flying apart, without the glitz or the glamour, but we long for the exhilaration of extinction still. I’m sorry Dad, but I cannot deny my own fire.  

[mitski-monologues]

Mitski is such an interesting artist and the way you highlight her work is not only smart but it is also intimate. I love what you are doing and I can't wait to see the songs you'll choose next!

oh my gosh thank you! i appreciate the encouragement; i hope i can validate your excitement!

[mitski-monologues]

i definitely believe in the concept of art being universal, and mitski's art is for everyone to find themselves in; it's human to derive personal meaning from art that wasn't created in the image of that meaning. it's just that a lot of the time mitski's identity gets completely separated from her art, when it's a big part of that. of course a white person could do an analysis without doing a deep dive into asian culture, but completely discounting that aspect like a lot of ppl do is kinda :///

yeah that’s fair!  and rest assured: despite being canadian, i’ve never cared much for cottages

[mitski-monologues]

3. Last Words of a Shooting Star

CW: Suicide

This is my biggest reach, considering the exalted position, its relative popularity, the phenomenal works that I have chosen to rank lower because of my love of this song. It is not among her most prominent works, it is never going to be played on Late Night television, it does not appear on Spotify’s ever-so-carefully curated “Best of Queer Asian Indie” or whatever playlists, even as much I believe it deserves more attention. But apart from my personal relation to the song, it is a tremendous lyrical composition; the mixed metaphors of a doomed airplane and a doomed girl in the first and third verses comprise some of her best work, how she maximizes the emotional potential of a simple structure with the separation of the second verse. And far from filler, the second verse holds multiple layers all on its own, including one of her most devastating owns in the culture, “you say you love me and look in my eyes / but I know through mine you were looking in yours”.

But more than any editorial notes I could make, I owe this to myself, to the child who spent weeks of their vanishing adolescence adrift in a maelstrom of their own devising, waiting for nothing more than to dissolve into the pre-sunrise air. Let me be clear, Last Words of a Shooting Star is the closest Mitski has come to contemplating ending it all; the final verse is hauntingly reminiscent of a suicide note, left on a smoothed-out blanket, in a bedroom now become a tomb. It is a difficult thing to say out loud, that you don’t plan on being here for much longer, but Mitski refuses to lean into self-pity or melodramatic glorification; there is something hauntingly mundane in the simple statement “I always to die clean and pretty / but I’d be too busy on working days”. I want to die, and this is not an unusual statement. I want to die, and that is a reality that I am bearing. I want to die, and that should be terrifying, but when I have been clinging to the face of the cliff since I was 13, it just is. Most admissions of this existential grief are overwhelming in their anger and sorrow, but Last Words of a Shooting Star acknowledges it as a simple fact. Apologies, she says, but goodbye.

[mitski-monologues]

OH THANK GOD i'm so glad bc a lot of the time w mitski so much of her intent gets erased and 90% of the time it's white people trying to make her fit w their cottagecore aesthetic so im glad that's not it here!!! you obviously aren't obligated to speak on Said Thoughts bc they are deeply personal and what you share is up to you,,, anyways, this seems like a rlly fun and cool project and you word your thoughts really well, i'm looking forward to more!!!

i updated my last answer to better reflect my thoughts on the matter; but thanks for caring enough to ask. i hope you stick around, i plan on putting up a couple per week depending on the pace of my real life. 

[mitski-monologues]

op i mean this as cordially as possible but by any chance do you happen to be white

First, to properly answer the question, I’m Chinese-Canadian, either second or third generation depending on which parent you look at. And trust me, I am fully aware that East Asian cultures are not interchangeable, there are experiences unique to being Japanese or Chinese or any of the other cultures deriving from our part of the world. There’s a very large conversation to be had about different Asian cultures and how we East Asians (generally referring to the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese) tend to dominate the Asian discourse, while those from Central and Southeast Asia can get drowned out and a lot of that derives from centuries of Chinese imperialism. I know what being Chinese entails, don’t @ me. 

That said, I don’t believe that being East Asian or non-white needs to be a requirement to access Mitski’s work. One of her great gifts that I plan on revisiting often in this blog is her ability to take what is personal and specific and render it universal; I am not a Japanese-American, but I can still understand impossible love and isolation. I don’t believe that you need to be East Asian to be affected by songs even as specific as Your Best American Girl, and the experience of a white person does not detract at all from mine. There’s enough depth in her work. 

I still believe in the universality of art, that while art illuminates what sets us apart, it also points to what brings us together. I don’t think Mitski writes to only be heard by Japanese-American children of US government agents who lived in Malaysia for a time, but of course a person’s cultural experiences will inform how they interact with her work, and I think that’s not only fine but great, so long as everyone is cognizant of their own influences. I think that a white person could also write this blog, that a project requiring this much attention and care demands a proper recognition of cultural biases and how that impacts how we listen to her. Obviously it would look different and that’s not a bad thing. Fundamentally, I don’t believe being Asian or whatever needs to be a qualification for critical and in-depth examination of her work. Thank you for taking the time to check out this idea, and thank you for caring enough to ask. 

[mitski-monologues]

2. Nobody

Nobody is unimpeachable. This is her biggest hit, her most iconic refrain, the one song in her catalogue with a famous Origin Story, à la Bon Iver. Mitski often tells how she wrote it: over the Christmas holidays, completely alone in Kuala Lumpur, on a mini piano she had just bought from a toy store. Anyone who has hated the holidays, felt isolated in a big city, or has a strange emotional connection to toy pianos can relate. Truthfully, Nobody has achieved its success in part because it is her most universally accessible work; who among us can deny the feeling expressed in one of the great opening lines in musical history, simply “my god I’m so lonely”.

The refrain is a masterclass in vocal control, where most artists would choose to allow some purgative release with a scream or a belt; instead Mitski continues to execute the performance with technical precision with some of the best melodic intricacies in her career. Even in the midst of the direst of proclamations, the one sickening word repeated ad infinitum, we are forced to hold ourselves together, to maintain appearances, to make sure that the performance remains steady. Many of the greatest musical depictions of hopelessness are soft dirges, allowing for melancholic contemplation, or all-out ragers, calling for manic catharsis, but Nobody builds energy throughout and then inflicts the tension upon us, and we have no choice but to carry it.

As I write this in the late summer of 2020, loneliness has never seemed as fundamental to the human experience, but this sort of season is not what Nobody is about. Nobody is about seeing a whole world sharing in the joys of existence and understanding that I have no part in it. Nobody says that on a fundamental level, I am incapable of being truly understood in a way that matters. Nobody means that out of seven billion people, not a single one can reach me; I am such an astonishing statistical impossibility that none of my best efforts can make me palatable. Nobody is Mitski’s most universally relatable work and arguably her bleakest; there is no reprieve from the isolation to be found here, the closest offering is the prospect of one good honest kiss.

[mitski-monologues]

1. Your Best American Girl

Of course. This was first and easiest of all the decisions that went into this project. It was always going to begin here. Every single skill that Mitski exemplifies reaches its apex: her technical mastery over musical catharsis, her ability to wrench the painfully personal into the triumphantly universal, her composition and writing unified into one of the great love songs of the last decade. For a love song it remains, even as she turns and walks away from all she ever wanted, as she repeats the immutable reason why she cannot stay, as she states simply “don’t wait for me, I can’t come”. Contrary to her own assertion from Square, Mitski recounts a love that scorches; here she reminds us that love means agony and regret and heartrending honesty. Your Best American Girl is the best sort of love song, not borne of awestruck delusion and optimism, but one that recognizes just how much we risk and how much love costs.  

 To me, the most important and heartbreaking line in the song comes between the two choruses, where she says simply “you’re the one, you’re all I ever wanted / I think I’ll regret  this”, before your tears and screams are carried away in the most exhilarating guitar riff, and I am driving away from my now ex-partner’s home, tears making it nearly impossible to see, with a deep-set fear that no one will ever love me as much as they did. It took me years to understand that you can both do everything right and still lose, that you can love someone more than you thought was possible and still be incapable of reaching them. It seems like a small and insignificant thing, that our mothers raised us differently, an obstacle that should be easily overcome by love’s all-encompassing fury. Love conquers all, right? The refrain “I do” carries an irrevocable connotation, but here Mitski uses it to say “no more”. She looks the pain of that statement in the face and embraces it, and he falls away. Sometimes, loving means acknowledging that this was never meant for me.  It was always going to end here.

[mitski-monologues]

THE IDEA

This blog is an attempt to rank and describe the collected discography of Mitski. I have chosen to only include the 55 tracks on her albums, thereby ignoring tracks where she is only a feature (Susie Save Your Love) or singles on movie soundtracks (Cop Car, Between the Breaths). This is for the sake of my own sanity as it’s much easier to only keep track of the five albums. As for the rankings, they are obviously completely subjective and I am really just choosing my favourites, although I do try to keep an eye on the public perception of these songs. In any case, the numerical ranking of each work is hopefully less important than what I say about them; more than anything this is an exercise in my writing skill. God only knows if it will be good, or even ever finished, but I have to start somewhere.