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.
MITSKIWhen you are a minority, it’s your job to bend, and when you love someone, you really want to make it work.
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 took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn’t last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn’t have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.
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It’s very tempting, when somebody says they like this about you, to want to do that over and over.
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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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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 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’m so smart. I am good at doing math really quickly in my head.
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Maybe this is a made-up belief to preserve myself, but I do believe that everyone has a purpose, and my purpose is to put out music that means something.
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A lot of musicians talk about how they were into music from the start; they always wanted to be musicians. It wasn’t like that for me. I didn’t think of it as a job or a career – it was just something that was constant.
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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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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 have this thing about being acknowledged and accepted by institutions.
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In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I’d never stayed in one place for so long.
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Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything.
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I really just care about making music and how I can make it next.
MITSKI