‘A Pearl’: The Mitski song she compared to ‘The Lord of the Rings’
Mitski has honed a songwriting style that is completely steeped in honesty. As she grapples with love and with loss, with sex and with addiction, and with everything in between, she approaches each topic with unflinching vulnerability, pouring her feelings into orchestral swells and aching melodies. It’s impossible to listen to her music and not feel everything she felt at the time of writing it.
But as much as Mitski is inspired by her inner life, she has also taken inspiration from stories external to her. Bury Me at Makeout Creek takes its title from a line delivered by Millhouse in The Simpsons, while Be the Cowboy featured a song that fuses the intimacies of her songwriting style with one of fantasy’s most famous franchises: The Lord of the Rings.
A couple of tracks into Be the Cowboy, Mitski delivers a show-stopper in ‘A Pearl’, a track that was never released as a single for the record but has still amassed hundreds of millions of streams for the singer. Like much of Mitski’s catalogue, it finds her examining feelings of love, both self-love and love from another.
The track opens with gritty twangs, over which Mitski declares, “You’re growing tired of me, you love me so hard and I still can’t sleep.” Throughout the verses, she continues to detail the difficulties of matching your low self-esteem up with someone else’s unconditional love. Her protagonist finds comfort in despair, while fearing the unknown happiness her lover could provide.
As Mitski explained to Saved by Old Times, the track is about how unhappiness becomes a crutch when it’s been your default state for so long. “So when you’re not unhappy,” she commented, “when you’re finally fine, you don’t know what to do with yourself.” Mitski mirrors this self-destructive tendency sonically in ‘A Pearl’, with moments of pounding drums and strums that suddenly pierce the peace.
But Mitski also finds the perfect metaphor for this feeling in a pearl kept from war – a tiny, rounded, token of beauty that allows her to hold onto the hardships of her past, to romanticise them and keep them close. This is where the connection to J.R.R. Tolkein’s iconic fantasy series comes in, as Mitski compared the metaphor to Smeagol’s preoccupation with the ring.
“It’s almost like Smeagol from Lord Of The Rings, where it’s just a pretty little thing in your hand that you hold on to,” she explained, “You don’t have to hold on to it, but in your mind you feel you have to…” Despite the beauty contained in a pearl, or in a ring, there is also destruction contained within that same object.
As long as Mitski holds onto the pearl as desperately as Smeagol, she will be unable to free herself from the feigned comfort that comes with sitting in your sadness. As she rolls it around and watches it glow, it allows her to stay in love with the war inside of her instead of designating that love to herself and to her partner.
Though Mitski doesn’t necessarily find resolution on ‘A Pearl’, the song is a masterful metaphor and sonic embodiment of that feeling, of the frustration that comes with fighting a war inside while trying to love yourself and another. Between her vulnerabilities and her penchant for fantasy, Mitski created one of the best efforts in her catalogue.
