Mitski

Mitski Miyawaki (born Mitsuki Laycock; September 27, 1990), known professionally as Mitski, is an American singer-songwriter. She self-released her first two albums, Lush (2012), and Retired from Sad, New Career in Business (2013), while studying studio composition at Purchase College's Conservatory of Music. The albums were originally made as her senior project. Her third studio album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, was released in 2014 on the label Double Double Whammy.
Mitski signed with Dead Oceans in 2015 and released Puberty 2 (2016), Be the Cowboy (2018), and Laurel Hell (2022), the last of which made the top ten in several countries. In 2022, The Guardian dubbed her the "best young songwriter" in the United States. That same year, she co-composed "This Is a Life" with Son Lux for the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. Her seventh studio album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, was released in 2023. The album's third single, "My Love Mine All Mine", became Mitski's first song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
Mitski was born Mitsuki Laycock on September 27, 1990, in Mie Prefecture, Japan, to an American father and a Japanese mother; she now uses her mother's surname, going by Mitski Miyawaki. Her first language was Japanese. She moved frequently while growing up due to her father's job at the United States Department of State, living in Turkey, China, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo before settling in the United States. She sang in a choir in high school and was 18 when she wrote her first song on the piano while living in Ankara, Turkey.
After enrolling at Hunter College to study film, Mitski decided to pursue music instead and transferred to SUNY Purchase College's Conservatory of Music, where she studied studio composition. During her time at Purchase, she recorded and self-released her piano-based first and second albums, Lush (2012) and Retired from Sad, New Career in Business (2013), as student projects. While there, Mitski met Patrick Hyland, who has produced her albums after Lush. In 2013, she collaborated with indie-rock artists Mike Rasimas and Mutsawashe Mangwendeza, providing vocals for the original song Ego and a cover of "Nightcall" by Kavinsky.
After graduating, she served as the vocalist for the short-lived prog-metal band Voice Coils and began work on her third studio album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, which was released on November 11, 2014, through Double Double Whammy. The album was reissued with four bonus tracks on April 7, 2015, through Don Giovanni Records. The album's raw, impulsive guitar represented a sonic departure from the orchestral and classical piano sounds of her first two albums. It garnered acclaim from numerous publications. However, it failed to become a significant commercial success.
On December 22, 2015, Mitski signed with Dead Oceans. She announced her fourth studio album, Puberty 2, on March 1, 2016, and shared the lead single, "Your Best American Girl". She released another single, "Happy", before the release of the album on June 17. Produced by Hyland, the album was recorded over two weeks at Acme Studios in Westchester County, New York. The album received widespread acclaim from music critics. "Your Best American Girl" was named the 13th best song of the 2010s by Rolling Stone. Her song "Francis Forever" was covered by Olivia Olson as the character Marceline the Vampire Queen in a 2016 episode of the Cartoon Network show Adventure Time.
On February 21, 2017, Pixies announced U.S. tour dates with Mitski as a supporting act. On May 1, a compilation album consisting of 100 songs by various artists titled Our First 100 Days was released. It includes Mitski's cover of One Direction's song "Fireproof". The compilation aims to raise funds for organizations that support causes threatened by Donald Trump's proposed policies. Mitski played a cover of the song in 2015, but that version has since been taken down. Mitski also covered Frank Sinatra's 1951 classic "I'm a Fool to Want You" for the 7-Inches For Planned Parenthood compilation album. On October 4, 2017, Lorde announced that Mitski would open for her on some dates on her Melodrama World Tour. On November 1, a short film starring Mitski called Sitting was released.
On April 20, 2018, Mitski teamed up with the experimental band Xiu Xiu on the song "Between the Breaths" for the soundtrack of the sci-fi comedy film How to Talk to Girls at Parties, based on the short story of the same name.
On May 14, 2018, Mitski opened pre-orders for her fifth studio album, Be the Cowboy, and released the lead single, "Geyser", with an accompanying music video. The second single and its video, "Nobody", was released on June 26, 2018, which became an unexpected viral hit years after its release, largely due to TikTok. The song’s chorus, where she repeatedly sings "Nobody", became widely used in TikTok trends, often paired with surreal memes or individuals running away from the camera. This virality introduced Mitski’s music to a broader audience, leading to a significant streaming boost—Be the Cowboy re-entered Billboard’s Top 200 in 2021, three years after its release.
The third and final single to precede the album, "Two Slow Dancers", was released on August 9 alongside a lyric video. Be the Cowboy was released on August 17, through Dead Oceans. It was critically acclaimed and named the album of the year by Pitchfork, Vulture, and Consequence of Sound.
On tour in 2018, Mitski began incorporating choreography into her live performances inspired by Butoh, a form of dance theater developed in post-war Japan, in which "performers draw on chaotic internal emotions but depict them with precise, repetitive gestures." The approach reflected her wish to "give audiences something new" on her second headlining tour since Be the Cowboy's release, as well as a desire "to develop her own, idiosyncratic ways of maintaining a grip on an audience", since she'd learned "that the jumping around onstage, getting everyone pumped up, doesn't come naturally to me." Mitski worked with performance artist Monica Mirabile to devise the tour's "highly stylized, sometimes unsettling" movements. Butoh-influenced choreography was also used in her music video for "Working for the Knife".
In August 2019, Mitski ended her hiatus from social media to post a statement denying allegations made by a Tumblr user that she had been involved in a child trafficking ring: "I don't know the accuser, and I don't know how or why they have come to associate me with their trauma."
In September 2019 at the final performance of her Be the Cowboy Tour in Central Park, Mitski announced that it would be her last indefinitely. She later talked about how she planned to quit music completely and "find another life". By early 2020, Mitski had changed her mind and decided to return to music, partly because she owed her label another album and partly for herself. She described making the decision to continue: "What it came down to was, ‘I have to do this even though it hurts me, because I love... This is who I am... I'm going to keep getting hurt, and I'm still going to do it, because this is the only thing I can do.’"
Mitski shared her new song, "Cop Car", in January 2020, a never-released piece from the soundtrack of The Turning. She was featured in the song "Susie Save Your Love" from Allie X's album, Cape God, released in February 2020.
On October 29, 2020, it was announced that Mitski would provide the soundtrack to the graphic novel This Is Where We Fall. The sci-fi Western story written by Chris Miskiewicz and Vincent Kings "unpacks themes of theology, death, and the afterlife". Of the project, Mitski said, "It was exciting to make a soundtrack for a comic book, It allowed me to work outside of my usual songwriting form and try to approach it like a score, but without any of the cues that come with working alongside a moving image, which ended up being both freeing and challenging. I hope the end result helps to immerse you in the story!" A country song called "The Baddy Man" was released as the first preview from the soundtrack on March 5, 2021. Z2 Comics released the album on cassette with the standard hardcover novel on May 5, 2021. A limited-edition deluxe vinyl was also released. At the moment, Z2 has no plans to put the soundtrack on streaming services.
On October 4, 2021, Mitski announced on her social media that she would be releasing a new single, "Working for the Knife", the next day as the lead single to her upcoming sixth studio album. The song would later be named the 7th best song of 2021 by Pitchfork. Soon after the song's release, Mitski announced her 2022 European and North American tour. She followed it up with "The Only Heartbreaker" on November 9, 2021. The same day, Mitski announced her sixth studio album, Laurel Hell, would be released just before her European and North American tour, called Laurel Hell Tour, on February 4, 2022. On December 7, 2021, "Heat Lightning" was released as the third single from the album. On January 12, 2022, "Love Me More" followed as the fourth single from Laurel Hell. In March 2022, "The Only Heartbreaker" peaked at number-one on the Billboard Adult Alternative Airplay chart. On March 4, 2022, Mitski was announced as one of the performers for the Glastonbury Festival, scheduled for June 22–26, 2022.
On April 19, 2022, Mitski's cover of "Glide", from the soundtrack of All About Lily Chou Chou, was released on streaming services. The song was previously available as a bonus track on physical versions of Laurel Hell and was used in the 2022 film After Yang. Mitski appears on the song "This Is a Life" from the soundtrack for the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once. The song also features David Byrne and Son Lux, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2023.
On July 23, 2023, Mitski announced her seventh studio album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, with information on the first single, "Bug Like an Angel", which was released on July 26. The news was revealed via a voice memo she recorded at Bomb Shelter Studio in Nashville, Tennessee, where the album was recorded. The voice memo was sent out to all subscribers of her newsletter. The following two singles from the album, "Heaven" and "Star", were released on August 23, with the former premiering on BBC Radio 1.
In order to promote the new album in August of 2023, Mitski announced a series of cinema experiences. These experiences involved a pre-release listening party for The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We alongside a screening of a film chosen personally by Mitski: these films included Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts, Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy and Federico Fellini’s La Strada.
Mitski also announced six concert dates set to take place in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. Mitski described these dates as "not a full-blown tour", but intimate and small enough to preview the album without elaborate stage production. She later added nineteen tour dates set to take place in the US in 2024.
In November 2023, it was announced that Mitski was attached to write lyrics and music for a Broadway adaptation of the 1983 novel The Queen's Gambit.
In March 2024, Mitski participated in the Spotify Singles series. Accompanied by Patrick Hyland on acoustic guitar and Jeni Magaña on double bass, she covered “Coyote, My Little Brother” and “Buffalo Replaced.”
E. Alex Jung described her as "an artist whose music feels like being ushered into a private opera house of melodrama" with lyrics full of "roiling fury, destructive impulses, humiliation, longing, heartache, and hunger". Angie Martoccio of Rolling Stone described her earlier albums as a "wry running commentary on twentysomething angst, raw desire, and often unrequited love". Lucy Dacus, a singer-songwriter who has at times opened for Mitski, described her music as "really visceral… She's connected to a part in herself that wants to scream. Maybe you don't live in a space where you can scream, or maybe you don't have the words for what has happened to you. Mitski provides a space for that."
Similarly, Mitski has described her music as a place where people "can put all of their feelings, their ugliness, that doesn't have a place in their own lives."
In a 2016 interview with The New York Times, Mitski described the tension of being a private person and her discomfort with the attention that comes with being in the public eye, therefore preferring to keep her personal life private. Since her breakthrough in 2014, she has often been described as private by the press.
As an Asian-American woman, Mitski has felt pressure to represent her community.
Mitski is not active on social media, and the accounts under her name are run by a manager. She left social media in 2019, around the same time she quit music, because she felt it was unhealthy for her self-image. However, she has gained massive popularity on social media. As of February 2022, her music has been featured in over 2.5 million videos on TikTok. In 2021, former President of the United States Barack Obama included "The Only Heartbreaker" in his yearly list of top songs.
On September 9, 2019, at a show in Central Park, Mitski announced it would be her last show indefinitely, causing her fanbase to express their distress on social media. The reaction online to this announcement prompted her to tell her fans she was not going to quit music; however, at the time, she intended to quit music for good. She has stated her main reason for quitting was that she had a difficult time grappling with newfound indie stardom when her 2018 album Be the Cowboy hit the mainstream.
Mitski said the music industry felt like a "super-saturated version of consumerism", and that in the industry "you have to be a product that's being bought and sold and consumed". She regrets using her actual name to release music because it no longer felt like it belonged to her, and she felt like "a foreigner" to herself. She feared that by continuing to make music, eventually she would begin to create music she did not care about. In 2019, Mitski wrote a new single, "Working for the Knife", where she describes her "reluctance to return to the stage". In February 2022, Mitski released a new record Laurel Hell, returning to the music industry.
Mitski has stated in interviews that she has an uneasy relationship with her fans because she finds their relationship to her and her music overwhelming. She found the "worshipful commentary" about herself online damaging to her self-image. Her fanbase has been described as "extremely online", "cultish", and as rivaling "Taylor Swift and BTS in intensity, if not size".
In a 2022 interview, she described the audience at one of her shows as "unrelenting". Recalling an instance where she had to proceed through an audience unescorted to her dressing room, she said: "Everyone needed a piece of me […] I was so overwhelmed by hands grabbing at me that I was crying." In February 2022, Mitski tweeted out a statement asking fans to stop using their phones to record her shows, as "…it makes me feel as though we are not here together… When I'm on stage and look to you but you are gazing into a screen, it makes me feel as though those of us on stage are being taken from and consumed as content, instead of getting to share a moment with you."
Mitski describes her cross-cultural identity as "half Japanese, half American but not fully either", a feeling that is often reflected in her music, which occasionally discusses issues of belonging. Mitski has expressed discomfort with calling herself "Japanese American" or "Japanese", and although she has described herself as "Asian American", she would rather "just say she's American".
Since 2020, Mitski has resided in Nashville, Tennessee.