The five best love songs in Mitski’s catalogue
The topic of love has been endlessly tackled and torn apart in song. “All you need is love,” affirmed The Beatles. “Love will tear us apart,” Joy Division countered. The conversation is still ongoing. Whether you’re scouring the depths of Rate Your Music for obscure finds or flitting through mainstream radio stations for something inoffensive to soundtrack your commute, sonic distillations of love are impossible to avoid.
While many have tried and failed to capture the feeling of love in a studio recording, there is one modern artist who never misses. Indie rock icon Mitski has been preoccupied with the topic ever since she released her debut album in 2012, and she has spent the last decade perfecting the art of the love song, approaching each attempt with unflinching grace and vulnerability.
Mitski doesn’t sugarcoat love. Her ruminations on the theme are always grounded in the more complicated reality – she considers co-dependency on ‘Me and My Husband’, grapples with unrequited feelings in ‘I Bet on Losing Dogs’, and attempts to reconcile her love with identity on ‘Your Best American Girl’. Each time she puts pen to paper with the intent of conveying the feeling, she somehow manages to capture love in all of its messy, confusing, dangerous, beautiful glory.
As she drives these thoughts home with cymbal clashes and orchestral swells, it’s impossible not to feel exactly how she feels. The same goes for her more optimistic takes on the subject, for her declarations of devotion and the rare moments in which she makes peace with love. Below, we’ve collated five of our favourite examples of those more hopeful takes on love from throughout Mitski’s catalogue.
Mitski’s best love songs:
‘My Love Mine All Mine’
It usually doesn’t make sense to start at the end, but love doesn’t make much sense either. Mitski’s most recent, most viral love song is also perhaps her greatest. ‘My Love Mine All Mine’ emerged as a standout track from Mitski’s most recent record, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, for its tranquil take on love.
Addressing the moon above her, Mitski takes ownership of her feelings, repeatedly acknowledging and affirming that while nothing else in the world may belong to her, her love certainly does. It’s not that she’s claiming ownership over her “love,” which means a person. Rather, the song finds her looking inward, admiring her own capabilities of love with little concern for reciprocation.
‘My Love Mine All Mine’ is one of the most considered takes on love, not only in Mitski’s discography but also in modern music. As she reaches up to the moon, asking it to immortalise her love, it feels like the culmination of her work and the sonic embodiment of her wishes.
‘I Will’
Taking its title from a line delivered by Millhouse in The Simpsons, Bury Me at Makeout Creek contained some of Mitski’s most incisive looks at love yet. Somewhere between the breathless feeling of ‘First Love/Late Spring’ and the devastating ‘Last Words of a Shooting Star’, she delivers a selfless, caring kind of love on ‘I Will’.
Bass twangs and swirling synths underscore her words as Mitski details soft, simple gestures that should be integral to any pure love. “I will take good care of you,” she repeats, detailing her devotion through hair washes and sleepless nights. She distills it down into one strained line: “All I ever wanted, allI want is always you, it’s always you.”
The track is one of the purest forms of love in Mitski’s discography, a kind of care that could be applied not only to a romantic partner, but to self-love, too.
‘Once More To See You’
Mitski’s protagonist in ‘Once More To See You’ is a little more hesitant to show her love through public displays of affection, though her feelings urge her to do so. She investigates a more secret form of love on this track, grappling with the emotion that threatens to spill out of her, pulling her to expel her love from the top of a rooftop.
Instead, she settles for smaller gestures like watching the sunset on her partner’s neck and making promises with pecks on her pinky fingers. The shrouded passion in the song’s subject is emphasised through thumping percussion and Mitski’s heavy vocal delivery, as Mitski longs to see her lover just once more.
It’s a slightly more mysterious kind of love, the kind of love they write stories about, but filled with all the weight of Mitski’s voice on the subject.
‘Two Slow Dancers’
Love’s tendency to feel bittersweet comes to the fore on ‘Two Slow Dancers’, the cathartic closing track from Mitski’s 2018 record, Be the Cowboy. Instrumentally, it pairs lonely, rounded piano tones with occasional breakthroughs from sweeping strings, both of which serve the reflective melancholy in Mitski’s words.
“Does it smell like a school gymnasium here?” she begins, in a line that seems impossible to spin as romantic. But as she ruminates on youth and on growth through the lens of two slow dancers, repeating the line, “To think that we could stay the same,” over and over, she proves that her ability to romanticise the ordinary stretches to linoleum floors.
‘Two Slow Dancers’ has a much sadder tone than many of the songs on this list, but it’s still one of her most beautiful ruminations on love, change, and the bittersweet feeling of moving on, even if you’re the last ones out.
‘Pink in the Night’
Elsewhere on Be the Cowboy, Mitski presents love as a rose-coloured glow on ‘Pink in the Night’. The instrumental is steeped in romanticism, with swelling, unbroken synths and gentle twangs that match the adoration of her lyricism. Her feelings of love in this song are so potent that they lead her to glow pink, to blossom, and, conversely, to feel her heart breaking.
It’s a song that contains all the terrifying, vulnerable beauty of falling in love in barely two minutes, and not only through the repeated declarations of “I love you”. As Mitski desperately clamours to kiss the object of her affections again, to “do it right” this time, her voice is brimming over with infatuation and longing.
It’s a song for those in the throes of early love, glowing pink with passion.
