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.
MITSKIWith 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.
More Mitski Quotes
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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.
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I’ve been asked whether I have a hobby, and have felt strangely offended that anyone would assume I have the time.
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My personality’s very obsessive-compulsive. I tend to fixate a lot.
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I think my real influences are out of my control, which are the things that entered my brain when I was a kid growing up.
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All I want to do at karaoke is sing Mariah Carey.
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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.
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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.
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When you’re an adult, things mellow out. I think when you’re a teenager and you are sad and the world is ending, everything is about that one sadness.
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It would actually feel forced or unnatural to try to do a different singing style or to try to change my sound completely.
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I’d always been fascinated by death, which sounds so morbid. Especially being a woman trying to make music, I think there’s a sense that you’re never young enough, or your career is going to end soon.
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There’s this myth that women are supposed to compete with each other or something, or we’re supposed to hate each other, and that’s totally not productive.
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I don’t want to be a musician’s musician. I want to be an everyone’s musician.
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I’m punk, but I love gold.
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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.
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I have a very conveniently photographic memory of emotions – it’s overwhelming, because things don’t fade for me.
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People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.
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I can’t read in a car, because I’ll get sick. It’s almost instant.
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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.
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I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I’m from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.
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Then you start to realise, ‘Oh, I’m bending a lot,’ and they’re just standing there existing, and I’m bending around them. But you can’t blame them: they don’t realise it; that’s just how they already existed. It’s hard.
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I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.
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Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.
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Whenever someone says they like something about my music.
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I’m so smart. I am good at doing math really quickly in my head.
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I’ve been very careful to always make clear that I am a real person. That’s why I’m on social media a lot.
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I didn’t fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive,
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