[Image text: A Mitski song lasts about as long as it takes to poach an egg. They are small and will knock you out, like pearls slipped inside the left ventricle of your heart. She has suggested that the brevity of her songwriting comes from a pressure to make herself known upon entrance; an awareness that she only has a short time to make an impression. She has tried her hand at lengthier forms of prose but finds her attention flags. The song is the ideal vehicle for the emotional journey she wants to create: an economy of words suffused with an oversaturation of feeling. Her lyrics speak to the lonely hearts aching in the corner, waiting for a furious love to crush them.
Working in the music industry creates a paradox: Writing demands vulnerability, but capitalism dehumanizes her. “I put my most intimate feelings in a song and sold it,” she says. She demarcates boundaries around the process. After she went dark on her social-media accounts, she handed the passwords over to her management. No A&R people are ever allowed in the studio. “I would lose my shit,” she says. “I couldn’t take any criticism from the business people. I’d be like, ‘Who the fuck are you? What do you do? Show me your work.’ ”
She speaks placidly while lobbing bombs. “Every day, all the time, is exploitation,” she says. “You can’t be a human being. You have to be a product that’s being bought and sold and consumed, and you have to perceive yourself that way in order to function. Everything in the world has a cost: If I truly want the greatest magic in the world, the highest euphoria, the best thing, if I want to do that, I’m going to have to pay an equivalent price.” She accepts this, mostly.
“How deep is it for you?” I ask.
“It’s … It’s my everything. It’s my whole life. It’s all I wanna do. I’ll take anything just to get to perform. I feel like myself. In my daily life, my head is just crowded with thoughts, my past, the future. But when I’m onstage, it’s just that moment, and I feel so connected to other people and to the world and to myself. That’s when I know what I’m doing. That’s when I’m the creator of a world. I am God. It’s a combination of being in control, but also being free to not be in control. You’re just existing and Being with a capital B onstage.”
Now that we’ve experienced lantern light, our guide suggests we should go one step further, and he snuffs the light out: true darkness. I put my hand out in front of me and flutter my fingers and, for a brief moment, feel as though I can see a flicker — a phantom bird flitting into my field of vision. But it’s just the brain groping for a ledge. I imagine myself unspooling into the void. I sense Mitski drifting away. Too quickly the light returns and breaks the spell.
“I’m sorry I left you all alone,” Mitski says, walking back toward me.
“I’m sad he turned the lights back on,” I say.
“I know,” she whispers. “I wanted to trip right here and be trampled. I wanted to fall down and be destroyed in this cave.”
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