The unbearable lightness of being Mitski
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Mitski knows about your memes. "I've been watching Succession like everybody else," the 31-year-old singer-songwriter confesses, "and the kids putting together Kendall Roy montages to my music is truly the best thing that's ever happened to me on the internet."
While the ruthless HBO drama's prodigal mogul and professional sadboy tends to lean more toward Wu-Tang and the Beastie Boys in his onscreen playlists, Mitski actually fits the musical tastemaker that Roy fancies himself to be — a critical darling whose shimmery, cerebral style of indie rock has made her the subject of long rapturous profiles in The New Yorker and landed her atop numerous year-end best lists.
The greater irony, maybe, is that the artist also known as Mitsuki Miyawaki quit social media entirely in 2019, just as her online fan base began to swell to levels most self-styled "influencers" would sell their mothers for. That means she only knows secondhand, for example, about her presence on TikTok, where the hashtag #Mitski has nearly a billion views: bored South American teenagers, stay-at-home moms, and giggling girls in hijabs all building their brands to the jaunty, bittersweet bounce of tracks like "Washing Machine Heart" and "Nobody," from 2018's Be the Cowboy. (One user described the latter song, fondly, as "a calm panic attack.")
Daniel Topete Mitski
The singer, who will release her sixth studio album, Laurel Hell, on Feb. 4, still finds that kind of attention a little overwhelming, even if the metrics of her particular fame don't exactly register on the Hot 100. "I'm still unpacking it," she admits of her success. "I'm not in this to be quote-unquote famous, but I want to be able to only make music as my job and make a middle-class living. That has always been the goal.… I mean, it's too late now," she adds with a laugh. "I have no other skills. My only résumé is all the waitressing jobs that I did, oh, 10 years ago. So this has to work out."
For the little girl who grew up switching schools, if not continents, nearly every year — her father's work for the State Department took them to Turkey, China, Japan, and the Czech Republic before she graduated high school — music was a comfort, not a career choice. "I always joined the choir because that was the one thing I loved to do, and most schools have one," she says. "It was my way into a community."
Mitski's 'Laurel Hell'
Later, she started to step out solo: "I was pretty quiet, and no one knew me. So I would go on stage at a talent show and people would be like, 'What is going on? Who is this girl?' And then I'd leave. It would always be a fun little joke I played with myself." (When she forgot the piano chords midway through Stevie Wonder's "Lately" and kept going a cappella, she recalls, "People thought I was being extra and just really belting.")
After transferring from film studies at Manhattan's Hunter College to attend the music conservatory at SUNY Purchase, she began self-releasing her student projects as albums; her third, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, struck a chord with the indie cognoscenti, and its triumphant follow-up, Puberty 2, earned her opening slots on the road with both Lorde and the Pixies. After an extensive 2019 tour for Cowboy, she took a well-earned hiatus, not realizing just how long the pandemic would make that break stretch.
Rune Hellestad - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images Mitski performing at Way Out West festival in Gothenburg, Sweden
It was also the first time Miyawaki had a chance to really choose her own home. A relocation to Nashville ("I moved here kind of knowing nothing about it," she admits) offered the space to settle, regroup, and then dive in again. The result is Laurel Hell, an album whose name, she explains, comes from a Southern Appalachian term for the thickets that grow so dense and twisty, "they're supposed to be hells that you can't get out of.… I like the notion of being trapped inside this maze and possibly dying within it, but also being surrounded by these beautiful, explosive flowers."
Death by gorgeousness is not a bad metaphor for Laurel, a collection of slow waltzes, sad disco, and imaginary musicals so enveloping and richly detailed that nearly every song feels like a short film. But Mitski's signature — the thing that makes the internet kids go wild, and has been known to bring grown men to tears at her almost church-like live shows — remains the forensic precision of her songwriting, the way she writes so vividly and seemingly unguardedly about sex and love and the general absurdity of being a person in the world.
"I wouldn't even get past the first round of American Idol. I don't have that sort of technique," she says. "It's just about 'Am I communicating a feeling? Am I connecting with another person?' That's all that matters."
Mitski's latest album, Laurel Hell, is out Feb. 4.
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