Mitski Miyawaki is meeting me for lunch, but when I arrive at a cafe in Los Angeles's soulless Century City, her bowl of soup is scraped clean. This maneuver is smart. There's nothing worse than doing an interview while trying to inhale food between questions. Still, I felt it inappropriate to not join her in soup, even after hers was done. So Mitski watches me slurp soup.
If you know anything about the singer Mitski or her four albums of witty, elastic punk, you'll know that she's been revered for her plainspoken, gut-curdling honesty. “You're the one, you're all I ever wanted / I think I'll regret this,” she sang on her first real breakout song, 2016’s “Your Best American Girl.” Mitski makes the idea of falling in love sound like the biggest bummer. That's more interesting to her. Beyond music, she's a riot on Twitter. Hers is a timeline of unpretentious side-eye at human trivia. “Oh thank you,” she smiles awkwardly, as though bad news is around the bend. It's our loss that Mitski's Twitter honeymoon period is over.
“I don't remember my tweet exactly,” she says of the moment she decided she was over it. “I was like, 'I'm tired.' I was tired of being on tour. The comments I got were: 'How dare you! You have so much privilege! You have the best job! Why don't you quit then?!' Twitter didn't feel compassionate any more.” She seems to be looking for that deeper connection, but not at the expense of Mitski. Her heightened self-awareness is almost disarming. She knows when she wants to quit. Even with sentences. They finish abruptly; punctured and flattened. This power stance is an artform. To be aware of when a point has been exhausted, to be confident you've given enough of yourself is a discipline many struggle to master.
For Mitski, that certainty comes from doing what she wants at all times. Be the Cowboy—her fifth record—is quite the instruction. “When I say 'cowboy' I mean the ideal swaggering Clint Eastwood cowboy,” she says. “In my daily life I tend to be the quintessential Asian woman so I thought, 'What if I was a tough white cowboy?'” The record is imbued with empowerment. The woman, or women, in it are often compromised by their own body dysmorphia, codependency, or feelings of inadequacy, but their awareness makes them unapologetic. “This album is about not taking responsibility for your mistakes,” she says. “Just fucking up and being like, 'Whatever.' That's what a white guy would do. In cowboy movies they're destroying a town but they're the hero. I'm entitled to these things.”
One place where this idea manifests itself for Mitski is onstage. “I try to inhabit more of a swagger than I have in real life,” she says. “Kim Gordon has a quote. You should probably look it up because I'm paraphrasing: People pay to see somebody be confident onstage.” (I looked it up later. The quote is: People pay money to see others believe in themselves.) What Mitski speaks to is common among women. We act out our heroes when we walk into rooms. It's aspirational for us, but it's isolating for Mitski, particularly night after night under the spotlight. She nods. “You have thousands of people looking at you. But they're not looking at you. You're a performer.”
Offstage, Mitski is businesslike and almost without intimacy. She speaks on what's required to explain her music but her boundaries are marked. Mitski won't discuss her personal life: family, other half/ves, home. Yet her delivery on record always feels exposed. She lets you know she's tortured but she doesn't want to be saved. There’s a gigantic wall between my soup bowl and hers. It's a weird disconnect. I wonder if she ever gets as much laughter from the world as she gives out? “I don't know,” she ponders. “That's a good question. A lot makes me laugh. I make me laugh. It disturbs people. I'll make a joke and laugh forever and people go, 'That's not funny.'”
Maybe Mitski was always her own best company. She grew up travelling so much it hindered her ability to keep relationships. Born in Japan, she went to high school in Turkey, moved to New York to study film then transferred to SUNY music school.“I never learned how to make friends,” she says. “I never learned how to make those compromises you have to make if you wanna stay friends. You gotta learn how to forgive, to say sorry. I just did exactly what I wanted. It's scary to me to not do everything I want to do. It's like I'm somebody else.”
If you're used to calling the shots all the time, then falling in love is particularly terrifying. “Geyser,” Be the Cowboy's lead single, is about the loneliness that accompanies new romance. In the video Mitski is running on a beach while doom-laden strings soundtrack this hopeless stumble into another. By the end her knees are almost bloody from crashing down. “I think I'm a masochist,” she notes. “Which is why I'm in music I guess.” “Geyser” is about changing your life for a lover. “What if you take that plunge and it doesn't work out?” she asks. “A lot of falling in love is solitary, especially as a woman.”
Mitski adds that qualifier a lot: “as a woman.” When her fourth album Puberty 2 became the indie record of 2016, Mitski was hailed as the savior of alternative rock, but the claim was always gendered. She was always a woman before she was anything else. “I never set out to be a girl power artist, you know?” she says. “My lyrics are about being fucked up. I'm not a Power Ranger. I've been stronger than I'm expected to be because I'm a woman. I'm weak and I'm not allowed to be, because then I lose my ability to control my destiny or whatever. Also, I'm Asian so suddenly I also have to be every single Asian woman. Which is half the world.” A laugh. “If you actually listened to my music you would never make me a role model.”
Puberty 2 is a happy success for Mitski but… “When someone says, ‘I love this about you,' I make a mental note: I'm never gonna do that again. Maybe that's a psychological problem I have to deal with.” Be the Cowboy is a series of narratives, most of them fictional, each one steeped in emotional truths. “Women are required to be actors,” says Mitski, resentfully. “Women have to be whoever their man desires. Be a dream! Be an ideal! We're trained to mould ourselves into a character just to fit the person you're with.” She quotes Lana Del Rey’s “Fucked My Way Up To The Top”: “'I'm a dragon, you're a whore.' Even though none of us would sing that, we relate to Lana Del Rey. She's a character but in some parts of our lives we've become her.”
The character device is a respectful and convenient one allowing Mitski to avoid further divulging upon the songs' intentions. She keeps a safe distance. “I never set out to make a song my diary,” she says. Yet from that distance, she's still trying to connect. “It's hard to continue to make music people can relate to. Your experiences are what people relate to.” Mitski knows that the loneliness she's felt in the past two years of extensive touring isn't accessible. “You're on the fringes of society,” she explains. “Everyone else has a place to live. Everyone else goes to work somewhere. Everybody has shit they wanna complain about. I can't complain about being a rock musician. Even if I tried, my best friends would say: 'Shut the fuck up, you get to write music.'”
Instead of moaning about being a guitar queen then, she's channeled those emotions into more common tales. Take “Me And My Husband” for example, an upbeat song about domestic solitude. Mitski doesn't have a husband. “Right,” she says. “If you're a suburban mom surrounded by family with a nice life you still feel alone. On tour, I'm surrounded by people all the time but it's lonely.” Throughout love is a battlefield. On “Why Didn't You Stop Me” she sings, “I know that I ended it, but why won’t you chase after me?” over a disco beat and a wobbly synth. A motif of needing to be kissed emerges on several tracks. A kiss, not a full-on sexual escapade. “I take everything seriously. I don't wanna get into my sex life.” So she doesn't. “A kiss means something to me.”
“A Pearl,” however, feels too specific a song to be made up. It's a stripped-back grunge number where she talks about apologizing for not wanting to get physical: “Sorry I don't want your touch, it's not that I don't want you.” We discuss the women's movement, how it doesn't protect women behind closed doors as we demand ownership over our bodies. “In the '70s, free love got twisted,” says Mitski. “Getting to have sex whenever you want is important. But not having to have any sex is just as important. Somehow it's been turned around on women: You're not truly feminist if you don't feel like you can have sex at any moment. A guy can be like, 'Are you a prude? Are you really a feminist?' Then you have something to prove.”
For their singer, most of the tracks don't seem to recall a person, but perhaps Mitksi's eternal partner: music. “Remember My Name” is set to a growly synth and pleads: “I need somebody to remember my name… I need something bigger than the sky, hold it in my arms and know it's mine.” Again, the sentiment is universal, but Mitski's ego keeps her on her own island. We're on the same page, and yet we're not.
For 16 nights of 2018, Mitski opened for Lorde on a world tour, which was “mindblowingly wonderful.” The audience amused her. “While I was playing I realized they'd never heard anything like my music. I saw so much confusion on people's faces like: 'What's happening?! What is this sound?'” Pop interests her. Her potential to surreptitiously influence it is occupying her mind. She's in L.A. for “meetings” but she's also here working on avant popstar Allie X's next album. She blames workaholism.
“Pop is what I was raised on,” she says. “But I was raised on it abroad looking to the West.” She remembers that growing up in Asia she was introduced to the likes of David Bowie via cover songs. Forever she thought “Life On Mars” was a song by an Indonesian artist named Anggun. “I was like, 'This is an amazing song.' I found out shamefully recently that it wasn't by her.” Because Mitski had access to American pop growing up, she knows its reach. “Pop music is what everyone can access. It's frustrating that a lot of it is the lowest common denominator of 'What will everybody like? What is the safest thing to do?'”
Of course, Mitski won’t play it safe. “The music business didn't wanna have anything to do with me,” she recalls of her early days. Industry types would tell her she didn't have the right “face” for a deal. But fans started showing up to her shows, and continued to support her. “I trust in the power of the listener,” she says. She remains reticent, however, to extend her influence beyond the art as conversation turns to music as a platform for social change.
“It's not healthy,” she offers. “We prop up artists as if they were politicians. Artists are often fucked-up people. I don't know anything about policy. I don't know how to run a country or a state or a city or even a community. There's a lot of push towards 'correct' art, art by outstanding citizens who are 'perfect' in every way but we need artists that represent every emotion. Some of our emotions are destructive. It would be unhealthy if people didn't have an outlet for sadness or anger. I don't want artists to be shitty people but I don't want artists to be held up to the same standards as politicians. We shouldn't have to be superheroes.”
It's funny because Mitski is precisely the artist whose perspective you want more of. At the age of 27, hers feels fresh, vital, and unafraid. Mitski herself is less afraid. “I can call myself an adult now,” she says. “Not everything is such a big deal to me anymore. Maybe that's a bit sad.” She quotes The Breakfast Club. “You know when one of the characters says: 'When you grow up your heart dies?” She looks jolly. “I believe that. Your heart has to die in order to survive the world. It's such a horrible world.”
I look down at my bowl. The soup is barely touched. A real cowboy would never have ordered it.
Hair and Makeup: Rachel Leidig
