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.
MITSKII don’t think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.
More Mitski Quotes
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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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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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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 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 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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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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When I go onstage and am performing the way I want to… I finally feel like myself.
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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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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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As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.
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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 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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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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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 don’t think ‘bleak’ is a bad thing.
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It’s nice to know there’s a big world with many perspectives. I tend to get so stuck in my own small world easily, and going out into the world reminds me that I’m not the center of the world – in a good way.
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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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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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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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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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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 always have strong urges to sabotage myself.
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You can never learn enough about music.
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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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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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I’ve stopped wanting a home, I think, because I’ve been on tour all my life, basically.
MITSKI