Mitski

I don't think I'm alone in this: I'm obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment.

— Mitski

I really like The Cars. They're just so over the top and super pop, but I don't feel guilty. I'm proud of all the music I listen to.

— Mitski

I really like The Cars. They're just so over the top and super pop, but I don't feel guilty. I'm proud of all the music I listen to.

— Mitski

When you love someone and care about them, you want what's best for them, and it's always the hardest thing to realize maybe you aren't what's best for them, how hard you try.

— Mitski

I don't think I'm alone in this: I'm obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment.

— Mitski

I tend to kind of try to use what's in my environment to the best of my ability rather than seek out things that I don't already have.

— Mitski

I think people don't realize how little of being an artist is making art.

— Mitski

I think your ego gets in the way of making something good because it kind of blinds you from the actual art.

— Mitski

When someone is a musician - trying to make a living off being a public figure - it's really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn't have a personal life.

— Mitski

I can't read in a car, because I'll get sick. It's almost instant.

— Mitski

If I have a song where I hit some really high notes, I want to try to bring in equivalently low notes somewhere in there.

— Mitski

I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn't identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.

— Mitski

Whenever I've tried to ingratiate myself to an existing community, I tend to give too much, to become whatever it is they want me to be. It's something I do automatically - I've learnt to immediately adapt.

— Mitski

When I record, it's this very precious and insular thing.

— Mitski

I remember I took a music course in junior year of high school, and some girl brought in 'Teardrops On My Guitar,' and she was like, 'Isn't this song great?' And everyone was like, 'Who's Taylor Swift?' And now, every time I listen to Taylor Swift, I remember that moment.

— Mitski

I'm not an innovator.

— Mitski

I think what's hard for me is not that I don't get downtime to chill, it's that I don't get time to make music.

— Mitski

I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there's more people in the audience than I'm used to.

— Mitski

I have this thing about being acknowledged and accepted by institutions.

— Mitski

On one hand, I think it's very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it's not talked about, then we won't progress. What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.

— Mitski

It would actually feel forced or unnatural to try to do a different singing style or to try to change my sound completely.

— Mitski

My father was obsessed with folk music from around the world, and I think the countless artists who performed them are my biggest influences.

— Mitski

I actually love the summer. When I went to Miami on tour, I was actually like, 'I love this place.'

— Mitski

In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I'd never stayed in one place for so long.

— Mitski

I couldn't wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn't actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don't really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that's what I wanted to do.

— Mitski

I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that's important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way.

— Mitski

I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously.

— Mitski

I don't set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it's about.

— Mitski

When you're young is the one time when you get to indulge in being morose and take yourself most seriously.

— Mitski

Honestly, in the music business, it's all about being cool or being the newest thing or being the 'It' person, and I've tried really hard to be what is expected of me or what would be advantageous to my career, and I just reached the point where I said, 'No, I'm an emotional loser. I can't pretend to not care.'

— Mitski

I try to be regimented and try to stay healthy and work out and eat properly and go to sleep. And not get too caught up in the industry in my regular life, so I can save all my expression and energy for my art.

— Mitski

A lot of musicians talk about how they were into music from the start; they always wanted to be musicians. It wasn't like that for me. I didn't think of it as a job or a career - it was just something that was constant.

— Mitski

On tour, people know that if they ever ask me what I want to eat, I will always say Asian food. I'm becoming a stereotype, but it's what I want to eat. I want to eat rice.

— Mitski

I lived abroad most of my life in insular international communities.

— Mitski

Tour isn't good for writing, but it's good for inspiration.

— Mitski

On tour, I don't drink, because I don't think in any other job you are supposed to get to work and drink whisky.

— Mitski

I don't think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.

— Mitski

I was a film major because, for some reason, I thought that that was a creative job that had more job opportunities. I don't know what logic I was following, but that was my impression at the time.

— Mitski

With solo shows, you have complete control over the set list. If you feel like you want to do something different or do a new song, you can just work it in. You can talk to the audience or not talk to the audience. There's nothing that's set.

— Mitski

I don't really listen to pop-country, but I like really, really old country that's closer to folk. Like Johnny Cash, who is considered country.

— Mitski

Pop artists work really hard, and they might not work for the same things that indie artists do, but they're still musicians, and they're still making art.

— Mitski

Sometimes when I perform, and it's obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it.

— Mitski

I've stopped wanting a home, I think, because I've been on tour all my life, basically.

— Mitski

The whole 'grunge-girl' comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.

— Mitski

“In tenth grade—this says a lot about how developmentally delayed I was—I had in my mind that it was the proper thing for me to have a love interest. And you’d see in movies where two characters instantly see each other and are, like, I’m in love!, and then it just cuts to them on a date or interacting...A lot of my adolescence was like that. Me thinking I was doing the right thing by re-creating a movie scene that I’d seen but then realizing that’s not how it happens in real life.”

— Mitski

“When people looked at me they couldn’t recognize any of the history of me, like, ‘Where is she from? What’s her ethnicity? Who is she?’ I just didn’t make sense to anybody.”

— Mitski

“By the time it was done my heart was pounding like I just saw the rest of my life. I was fucking doomed.”

— Mitski

“I’ve always grown up feeling lonely or other, but through my music, I can be like: ‘Look, we’re the same, we’ve felt the same thing, so we’re not so different. I belong here.’ It’s almost like a hungry monster that’s just a constant need to feel connection.”

— Mitski

“I was always bothered when people say, ‘I cry to your music, it sounds like a diary, it sounds so personal,’…Yes, it is personal. But that’s so gendered. There’s no feeling of, ‘Oh, maybe she’s a songwriter and she wrote this as a piece of art.’”

— Mitski

“I like to say something in as little time as possible…I don’t think I have the fundamental confidence necessary to write a four-minute meandering song. Number one – because I'm impatient. But number two – because I’ve never been someone who is listened to. No one would stop to listen to me. I'm not a white guy noodling on a guitar for 45 minutes. No one would stay for me. I learned from a young age to be concise because there’s a very small window for me to grab someone's attention.”

— Mitski

“…A lot of the ‘yous’ in my songs are abstract ideas about music...I will neglect everything else, including me as a person, just to get to keep making music…And even if it actually sometimes hurts, it doesn’t matter as long as I get to be a musician.”

— Mitski

“I think it's a very feminine album…There can be something incredibly violent about being a woman and having desires as a woman – not so nice, not so soft. And I think that's an interesting experience to draw on…"

— Mitski

“The phrase ‘Be the cowboy you want to see in the world’ has been an inside joke between me and myself…I would always kind of say it to myself in situations where I feel like I’m sort of trapped in my own mind. Like, ‘Oh, what would a swaggering, western movie cowboy do in this situation?’”

— Mitski

"I think the theme that I unfortunately saw—unfortunately for me—was the theme of loneliness or the idea of being alone…And the idea of being alone, not because the world is forcing you to be alone but because you are the person causing your aloneness…”

— Mitski

I think there is in my previous albums a very useful romanticization or glorification of a sadness...wherein Be the Cowboy, there's a realization that no one gives a shit that you're sad, and you're still sad. Your sadness is no longer profound, and you're still sad. It's that kind of growing up and realizing that it's not cool anymore to be sad, but you're still sad.

— Mitski

“…it was actually about when you have some kind of toxic relationship to yourself, or to another person, for so long that it becomes your identity. Even when you don't need it anymore and you've stepped away from it, you still hold on to it because it's scary to let it go — because if you actually let it go, it feels like erasing yourself. That song is about likening that sort of toxicity to a pearl.”

— Mitski

I don't think I'm alone in this: I'm obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment.

— Mitski

When you love someone and care about them, you want what's best for them, and it's always the hardest thing to realize maybe you aren't what's best for them, how hard you try.

— Mitski