I don’t think ‘bleak’ is a bad thing.
MITSKIOften I’ve had problems automatically bending to a lover’s will, becoming what I know they want me to be. Immediately, I learn all the music they love, listen to it, study it, instead of being like, ‘This is what I love!’
More Mitski Quotes
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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 have this thing about being acknowledged and accepted by institutions.
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When you are a minority, it’s your job to bend, and when you love someone, you really want to make it work.
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Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.
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All I want to do at karaoke is sing Mariah Carey.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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 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.
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I think people don’t realize how little of being an artist is making art.
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I don’t think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.
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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.
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I can’t read in a car, because I’ll get sick. It’s almost instant.
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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.
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The whole ‘grunge-girl’ comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.
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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.
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When I started making music, I was like, ‘This is something I can believe I was meant to do.’
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I tend to not want to do that anymore. It’s not even that I don’t like it anymore: it’s that I keep trying to find ways for people to dislike me.
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What’s important to me is that my songs can exist without any material anything. It’s very reflective of my ideology.
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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.
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I think it’s our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we’re able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn’s case, we as artists somehow made it ‘cool’ enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.
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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.
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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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