![]() The ambiguity around “Husband” underlines another reason to love Mitski’s music: None of her songs holds one simple meaning. Even a seemingly more wistful track like 2018’s “Me and My Husband” reveals itself with more listens as being either about a woman trapped in a floundering marriage she keeps telling herself is just great or about a woman who has become trapped by the idea of how she needs to be married (preferably to a man) to have a full life. One of her best-known songs, for instance, 2016’s “Your Best American Girl,” is about growing up as a non-white woman (Mitski is Japanese American) in a country whose visions of femininity are skewed hopelessly toward whiteness. The idea of being trapped is everywhere in Mitski’s music once you go looking for it. Laurel Hell actually sold enough physical copies to debut atop the Billboard album sales top 10. The kind of eclectic, ambitious art pop Mitski traffics in has rarely won over a massive audience, but Mitski’s cult fandom continues to grow with every new release. 4 issue of Billboard.The subjects of Mitski’s songs are almost invariably trapped by their circumstances, something that dovetails with the artist’s frequently professed misgivings about the level of fame she has attained. This article originally appeared in the Aug. “I’m going to keep being a musician for as long as people let me, so by the time I put out seven or eight albums, maybe people will realize I’m not putting out music because I’m Asian.” She’s doing it, she adds, because “I can’t do anything else.” Yet she can’t help but be proud about the growing presence of Asians in popular culture: She’s quick to note the big-budget, Asian-led film Crazy Rich Asians opens in August, as does the Asian-coming-of-age flick To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, which hits Netflix the same day Be the Cowboy arrives. She has repeated in many interviews that she doesn’t want to just talk about being Japanese - something that would reinforce the idea that she’s an indie-rock token. ![]() With her Asian heritage, Mitski is aware she’s an outlier even in the current indie-rock scene, which is now less talked about as a boys club thanks to rising acts like Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy. “The hope is that 15 years from now, when I’m too tired to tour, I will already have that other musical job set up,” she says. (“You get a discount on taxes because you give the government money that you’ll get back later,” she explains.) She has also started writing songs for others, including Canadian pop singer Allie X. “I never thought I’d be this cliche, but I’m really like, ‘Wait, do I want children?’” She’s now big on investing money and recommends a SEP IRA for the self-employed. “I’m thinking about now, and it’s crazy,” she says. Her music and videos play with fantasies of settling down, and as Mitski gets older, she has found they increasingly mirror her actual desires. Mitski photographed on Jat North Brooklyn Farms in Brooklyn. On “Lonesome Love,” Mitski whispers, almost unemotionally, “Nobody fucks me like me.” This line, she says, is “true.” “Me and My Husband” seems to invite speculation about her love life, though Mitski says it’s fictional and that she only “wanted to use that idea of a stereotypical housewife.” Where Puberty 2 centered on a teen heroine, Be the Cowboy takes a more grown-up, boundary-pushing perspective. I don’t want my relationship with them to jeopardize their privacy.” ![]() But the people that come into my life or that I love, they didn’t make that choice or choose this life. “I accept all the consequences of what I do because I want to make music,” she says. But as open as she may be with her emotions, Mitski is guarded about her personal life. Its first single, “Nobody,” where Mitski bemoans, “I know no one will save me,” has garnered 1.3 million on-demand U.S. Be the Cowboy isn’t a total departure from Puberty 2 - there are plenty of the lonely-heart anthems that first drew fans.
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