One evening, after singer Mitski had given a concert in a small club, she had to go through the hall back to her dressing room. On the way she was attacked by the public, everyone wanted to touch her, take a picture, grab her clothes. She felt so threatened that she started to cry. That didn’t stop the fans either, they didn’t see her contorted face and kept reaching for their idol.
The name Mitski Miyawaki may not be known to everyone, but the relationship between American-Japanese singer/songwriter Mitski (1990, born in Japan to a Japanese mother and American father, now based in New York) and her following is intense. She notices this via social media and from personal reactions. Mitski is a welcome sounding board for her fans, who recognize themselves in the candid lyrics about fear, failure and broken love. In her songs she expresses, she says herself, all aspects of being human: both vulnerability and resilience, sadness and pleasure, fallibility and excellence.
For example, in ‘Nobody’, on her previous album, she sang ‘I’ve been big and small/ And big and small again/ And still nobody wants me’. She seems to be complaining, but the endlessly repeated ‘nobody’ in the chorus makes the song sound like an ode to loneliness. Mitski has several contradictions. Because even though she doesn’t like attention – she just announced a publicity freeze – her music is becoming more streamlined and seductive. Gone are the whimsical arrangements and obnoxious songs from her early days. With each album the style became more elaborate, the music more exciting, the vocals more flowing.
On the new sixth album Laurel Hell (the title refers to the ‘hell’ of the laurel wreath, the fame) she tends to the general public with grand productions. The album, which has been enthusiastically received worldwide, incorporates shrill synthesizers, as if from the eighties, in contemporary, eclectic songs. She also has vocal quality: a strong stadium voice with sad undertones.
It was after the previous, fifth album Be The Cowboy (2018) that Mitski decided to retire from the music industry. Her audience’s success and reactions frightened her. She came back to this recently, but from then on she only wanted to make music for fun. The joy was in patiently expanding the instrumentation, taking an example from her own heroes such as Hall & Oates. Laurel Hell sometimes sounds like she collaborated with Björn and Benny from ABBA, so lavish is ‘Should’ve Been Me’: a piano tune, a synthesizer sweep and nervous strings draped around a skeleton of smeared bass and disco drums.
Except for the mysterious ‘Working For The Knife’, some songs, such as ‘The Only Heartbreaker’ and ‘Love Me More’, are top heavy. The trumpet blows an attack signal, after which a chorus of fans and fellow sufferers sing along in ‘That’s Our Lamp’. That’s a nice concise story about a divorce, but the frame is so heavy that the core gets snowed under.
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