On the Road with Mitski (2024)

She’d grown up listening mainly to the American pop hits making the rounds abroad—Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, ’N Sync. Once, though, she’d stumbled on a CD by the folksinger Jeff Buckley that made her realize there were other ways of writing songs. Eventually, she discovered M.I.A. and Björk, whose unconventional self-presentations confirmed to her, she said, that “you can do what you want—it doesn’t have to be this pop formula, and you don’t have to have this voice or look this way.” Mitski was fascinated by classical music, too; in high school, she bought the score for “The Rite of Spring,” in an effort to understand how the orchestral parts worked together. Still, she said, none of the music she knew “really expressed what I was feeling.” That morning in Ankara, “suddenly there was something that was coming out of me that I could sing—and it was just such a rush.”

“Bag of Bones,” the song that resulted, appeared on her first album, “Lush,” which she released online, in 2012. The song is sparer than her later music, which incorporates eighties-style synths, programmed drum machines, and propulsive guitar. But it’s possible to hear in this recording much of what Mitski would become. “Bag of Bones” juxtaposes an eerie melodica riff, like something from a Weimar-era night club, with tender vocals. It showcases her morbid sensibility and her talent for writing lyrics that are as taut and imagistic as an objectivist poem. The song’s narrator is stumbling home from a party, “after everything’s done and I’m all undone.” She observes, “You can hear my high heels walking on/Clickety-clacking through the night/I’m carrying my bag of bones.” The effect, as in many later songs, is sad and beautiful and creepy all at once.

Mitski often stresses that although she is a young woman who writes emotionally saturated songs, they do not pour out of her like diary entries. She is devoted to craft and control. “Bag of Bones” is one of her few compositions that arrived in a kind of fever state. And that moment of inspiration saved her. “I’m fundamentally just someone who needs to give myself to something,” she told me. “And so I decided on music.”

Mitski’s melodic lines often deposit the listener in unexpected places, rarely resolving in any conventional way. Iggy Pop has described her as “probably the most advanced American songwriter that I know.” Her love songs are often about passions held in secret, in the echo chamber of the narrator’s heart, and the over-all effect is often surreal: the beloved is rendered solipsistically, and the pledges of devotion are unsettling. “If I could, I’d be your little spoon/And kiss your fingers forevermore,” she sings, in “Your Best American Girl.” “But, big spoon, you have so much to do/And I have nothing ahead of me.”

A 2018 headline on the NPR Web site named Mitski the “21st Century’s Poet Laureate of Young Adulthood.” But her fan base is more particular than that. Young Asian women and young queer people make up a lot of it. Her L.G.B.T. admirers seem to respond to the way her songs evoke, with theatrical grandeur, the covert emotions of someone outside the mainstream. At her shows, I’ve noticed that an unusually large proportion of the audience is there alone.

The musician Phoebe Bridgers recalled playing a 2016 show with Mitski at which John Doe, from the punk band X, was in attendance. “He was, like, ‘All these kids look like they’re at a f*cking church’—it looked like a punk-show crowd, but the kids were rapt with attention,” Bridgers told me. “He was blown away, and so was I. Mitski was playing solo, and the music was like this ethereal music from another dimension.”

Bridgers said that she admires the “weirdness of the creative choices that Mitski seems to make so confidently.” Mitski sings for prickly introverts, or for anyone who has ever wanted a lover to just go home already, so that she can yearn for him in peace. The lyrics in Mitski’s songs often project a paradoxical attitude that I associate with a specific type of millennial-feminist art—Sally Rooney novels come to mind—in which female strength takes the form of defiantly displaying a full range of roiling emotions, including self-abasing or submissive ones.

Michelle Zauner, the front woman of the band Japanese Breakfast, told me that one of her favorite songs is Mitski’s “I Bet on Losing Dogs,” from the album “Puberty 2.” Mitski sings, “I know they’re losing and I pay for my place/By the ring/Where I’ll be looking in their eyes when they’re down/I’ll be there on their side/I’m losing by their side.” Zauner said of the track, “It sounds like somebody so strong but also filled with so much self-hatred. There’s something so morose and menacing about that song, and the aura of just submitting to this ill fate.”

One bright, cold afternoon in March, I went to a studio in Brooklyn to watch Mitski and her band rehearse for a national tour that she was planning for the spring and summer. It was to be her second headlining tour in North America since her acclaimed album “Be the Cowboy” was released, in August, 2018, and she wanted to give audiences something new. She was working with Monica Mirabile, a performance artist and a movement coach, to devise elaborate choreography for each song. Both of them had lately become interested in a form of dance theatre, from postwar Japan, called Butoh, in which performers draw on chaotic internal emotions but depict them with precise, repetitive gestures. On tours for earlier albums, Mitski often performed with a bright-pink guitar; this had delighted fans, but she felt that it had become a crutch. She wanted to come out from behind the instrument, but, as she put it to me, she’d learned early in her career “that the jumping around onstage, getting everyone pumped up, doesn’t come naturally to me.” Nor was she comfortable wading into a crowd and letting people hug her or take selfies with her. She wanted to develop her own, idiosyncratic ways of maintaining a grip on an audience. To this end, she’d tried various disorienting strategies, such as standing perfectly still throughout a show, or opening it with a bloodcurdling scream.

Mitski is peculiarly attuned to the brevity and fractured nature of modern attention spans. Many of her songs last less than three minutes, both because she’s a concise writer and because she is mindful that nobody has to be listening to her. When she was starting out—a young Asian-American woman playing arty, anguished songs in dive bars—she knew that the clientele was unlikely to indulge her if she played long wailing guitar solos or sang endless verses. She recalls that, at one point, a heckler yelled at her, in a mocking Valley Girl voice, “You’re depressed!”

For someone who writes vividly about emotional chaos, Mitski has a striking devotion to order and discipline. Zauner, who toured with her in 2016, told me, “I was from a D.I.Y.-punk environment with a lot of rowdy guys and a lot of drinking. On tour with Mitski, I felt like I entered this much more professional, healthy, regimented realm. At first, it was hard for me to adjust, because I’m a little bit goofier. It was, like, ‘What do you mean we’re not going to get an Airbnb together and party in the desert?’” But Zauner came to appreciate a different approach. “There are still a lot of things that happen on the road that are not the most supportive to women in music,” she said, noting that Mitski had a forthright way of dealing with them. “She’d go to the sound person, for example, and introduce herself and assert that she was going to be the one to talk to if they had any issues about tech. There are some dinosaur types who are rude to you, and a lot of times I would deflect to my male drummer—I didn’t want to be condescended to. I was impressed that Mitski took that on every night.”

Mitski told me, “Maybe it just boils down to: I’m a woman who’s really into her career, so I’m obsessed with the craft of my work.... There’s a romance in that for me.” She went on, “I obsess over one phrase of one line of music, over and over, and I switch out words. It ends up being my biggest relationship.” Indeed, some of her songs that address a “you” aren’t about a person at all; they’re about music itself. “Geyser,” which starts with a spine-tingling organ processional, builds to Mitski singing, “You’re my number one/You’re the one I want/And I’ve turned down every hand/That has beckoned me to come.”

“Geyser” took more than ten years to complete. That was extreme—in general, Mitski does not sit on a song for more than a year. But she often writes her music in snatches, over time, especially now that her touring schedule has become more demanding. “I do more sort of thinking—of a phrase here and there, or a sound there—and then writing it down in my notebook, or singing it into a Voice Memo, putting the pieces together later, like a puzzle,” she said.

Mitski can be wryly amusing in person, as she sometimes is in her songs. (“Nobody butters me up like you and/ Nobody f*cks me like me.”) She has a fluty, controlled speaking voice; a smile that blossoms slowly, taking in her eyes last; and the kind of lilting laugh that would suit an animated princess. She’s delighted by ghost stories and talked to me excitedly about developments in murder cases that she’d been following, mainly through podcasts. “Can I tell you about it? Do you have time?” she asked me before launching into an account of a fresh twist in the infamous Black Dahlia case. Later, she said that she was obsessed with these podcasts because she had been “just thinking about death” a lot.

We were in Bushwick, at an Ethiopian restaurant that she likes, drinking tea and sharing a vegetable platter. Mitski is a good conversationalist, in part because she likes to draw attention away from herself by asking smart questions, and in part because she has developed the elegant poise of a fifties movie star at a press conference. At one point, she noted that journalists kept asking her to show them “a day in the life of Mitski” and that she was bemused by what they had in mind. “I keep being, like, ‘O.K. Do you want to come to a few meetings with me? Do you want to come see me rehearse? Go on tour?’ And they’re, like, ‘No, let’s go out on the town, go shopping, look at vintage clothing.’ And I’m, like, ‘I don’t do that!’” Her theory was that people didn’t really want to read about women working: “They want to imagine women having fun, being sexual, lounging.”

We returned to the rehearsal studio, which had concrete floors, no windows, and a “Thank You for Not Smoking” sign. (A past user of the space had doctored the sign to read “Thank You for Pot Smoking.”) Mitski and her band were running through her show in sequence. Her longtime producer, Patrick Hyland, was on guitar. The other members of the band were newer additions: Bruno Esrubilsky on drums, K.Marie Kim on keyboards, Jeni Magana on bass.