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.
MITSKII 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.
More Mitski Quotes
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I created this ‘ideal America.’ Finally I came to the U.S. and realised, ‘Oh, I don’t belong here, either.’
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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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Often 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!’
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I don’t care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.
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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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I guess you can say I ‘do the Twist.’ I like playful dance moves that aren’t too serious.
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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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I actually love the summer. When I went to Miami on tour, I was actually like, ‘I love this place.’
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If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to 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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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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I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.
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I don’t set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it’s about.
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I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there’s more people in the audience than I’m used to.
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I hate that my opinions are gonna be on record… that my opinions of other artists are going to be on record.
MITSKI