“Why is Mitski opening for HARRY STYLES?!” my friend messaged me. “I think she’s leaving” I replied. Mitski opens her video interview for Dazed by saying “Sometimes I think the true purpose of my working hard to make money is just so I can finally be left alone”.
So, while the move to support pop icon Harry Styles seemed like a strange move for an enigmatic alternative cult figure like Mitski, especially one who so openly dislikes fame, to my mind it made complete sense. How can an artist make sure she makes the most money possible from a single tour circuit and album release? By touring with possibly the biggest star they can find while promoting their final record. To me, that announcement confirmed my suspicions that the record Laurel Hell would be just that- final.
In 2019, Mitski announced that she was leaving music indefinitely, then clarified that it wasn’t permanent. She has since revealed that she had in fact intended to leave it for good. Fuelled by the solitude of the pandemic and spurred by a contractual agreement with Dead Oceans for one final album, however, she decided to return. Mitski’s response to her return, both through her interviews and the music itself, has been characteristically nuanced and complicated. Perhaps the most obvious example of this can be seen in two NME headlines, the first quoting the singer stating that she didn’t quit music because it’s “the only thing I can do”, the second only months later shares that her return to music felt “Terrible. Absolutely terrible”.
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"the aversion to the life of a musician causes an anguish that has permeated her entire public presence and work, turning her last record into what feels like a goodbye letter..."
This push and pull of the love for music and the hatred of the life it entails is visible most potently through Mitski’s writing itself. “You’re the one I want and I’ve turned down every hand that has beckoned me to come” she sings in Be the Cowboy’s love song to music ‘Geyser’ only to later lament that she can only “feel the harmony on when it’s harming me”. Of course, the painful dichotomy that is the compulsion to create vs the destruction it causes the creator is common in the work of many writers and musicians. Take, as a recent example, Florence Welsh singing “How much is art really worth? The very thing you’re best at is the thing that hurts the most” in Florence and the Machine’s ‘King’. For Mitski, however, the aversion to the life of a musician causes an anguish that has permeated her entire public presence and work, turning her last record into what feels like a goodbye letter.
The lyrics throughout Laurel Hell all point to her departure. The scene is opened with ‘Valentine, Texas’ asking “who will I be tonight?”, a question to an audience that required her to be whatever iconic image they have projected onto her. Next up is ‘Working for the Knife’, the first single released and a thematic emblem for the entire record. A damning perspective on the mundane trapping of artists in creative industries and the impossible conundrum between wanting to live off what you make but having to deal with being consumed and exploited in the process. ‘Working for The Knife’ sees Mitski dealing with the fact that “at twenty-nine the road ahead appears the same” but hoping that at thirty she’ll “see a way to change”. Now at thirty-two, perhaps Mitski is finally making that change.
Fast forward to the two final tracks on Laurel Hell, and we see Mitski signing off. Though both these tracks can be interpreted as songs about relationships between two people, it feels more apt to be applied to the relationship between Mitski and her audience. We can see the thread that pulls through ‘Geyser’ into 'Working for the Knife' being knotted as Mitski sings “I guess this is the end, I’ll have to learn to be somebody else”, before telling her listeners “thank you”. The record closes with the upbeat ‘That’s Our Lamp’, leaving us with the repeated refrain “That’s where you loved me”. In her interview with Pitchfork, Mitski herself describes this last song as “happy, carnival, goodbye”.
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This Valentine’s day Mitski announced that her merch shop would close, and all of her photos on Instagram were deleted to be replaced with the single image of a closed door. The symbol of the door has been heavily present throughout her stage show, with Mitski dancing around and even banging on it. Perhaps this is a reference to “the price…at the door” that Mitski talks about in her interview with Huck. The invisible price that being in the industry cost her, the feeling of being trapped both inside and outside of something. By reclaiming that door as a protection, Mitski closes it and herself behind it, shutting out the world which, in her own words, “consumed, bought, and sold” her.
Despite what seems a final exit, however, Mitski hasn’t announced her leaving, though this perhaps could simply be due to a wish to avoid the outcry from fans that happened last time she announced her departure. I think that this is her goodbye, and part of me wants it to be. We have all grown up on the tragedies of artists pushed too far by the industry, and I would rather see Mitski leave than burn out.
Of course, I am sure she can continue to write songs for other artists as she does now, giving her the luxury of creating without the spotlight. Her song writing for the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, and her creating the soundtrack for the graphic novel This is Where We Fall could point to a different and less involved way of creating without fame. And there is of course always the possibility that even if she fully intends to leave the industry entirely as she did last time, she could come back.
She has always said that music is the only thing she can do, and perhaps this is just the hope of a die-hard Mitski fan, but the luxury of a door rather than a wall, is that even once closed it can always be opened.
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