Music was the one thing that was just mine, and no one could take it from me. I created it, dictated it, and it made me not able to let go of it.
MITSKII’m so smart. I am good at doing math really quickly in my head.
More Mitski Quotes
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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 really just care about making music and how I can make it next.
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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 always have strong urges to sabotage myself.
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I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.
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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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What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.
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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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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 didn’t fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive,
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I couldn’t wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don’t really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that’s what I wanted to do.
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I would love for Rivers Cuomo to listen to my music and see what he thinks.
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When you’re doing something you’re not used to, you kind of realize that you’re still a kid: even though the whole world around you sees you as an adult and you’re expected to act like an adult, you still haven’t actually grown up.
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I understand that, because there are so many musicians, you have to make artists into brands, but I sometimes feel like I have to be some kind of non-human icon in order for people to listen to my music.
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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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Whenever someone says they like something about my music.
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I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn’t identify as that before I came here.
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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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I have this thing about being acknowledged and accepted by institutions.
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My personality’s very obsessive-compulsive. I tend to fixate a lot.
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I was one of those girls people called ‘intense.’
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You always want what you can’t have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born,
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Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.
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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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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 know for a fact that I’m problematic. I shouldn’t be looked to for any kind of guidance.
MITSKI