Mitski’s deviated journey from J-pop pathway to acclaimed indie songwriter
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Mitski is one of the best songwriters of her generation. 12 years after the release of her debut album, the self-released Lush, she has captured the headphones and hearts of millions with her vulnerable meditations on love and longing, identity and insecurity, and everything in between. She’s a master of poetic lyricism and art pop instrumentation, but she wasn’t always so confident in her abilities with a pen.
Long before Mitski wrote some of the best lyrics in contemporary music, before she became a songwriter at all, she was a budding singer who believed that her talents didn’t extend beyond the microphone. This misguided belief may have stemmed from an experience in her youth when she was working with a talent manager who hoped to turn her into a Japanese pop idol.
Mitski spent much of her childhood moving from place to place due to her father’s job in the State Department. In her mid-teens, she ended up in her mother’s homeland of Japan, where she stumbled upon an idol manager who pushed her in a certain direction artistically. He wanted her to be a “cute young girl artist or, not artist, pop idol,” she once recalled during an interview with The Sound Between on WNYU.
This involved singing songs penned by other people, something that Mitski wasn’t particularly happy with. “At a certain point I just turned to him and said ‘All the songs you’re giving me are really bad. I don’t want to sing any of this,’” she remembered. But she was scuppered by his response, as the talent manager asked her to write something better.
“I couldn’t,” she explained, “Because I wasn’t writing at that point and I didn’t even consider the fact that I could write anything.” The interaction didn’t necessarily push Mitski to start writing straight away – it was only a couple of years later that she set out to create songs of her own – but the moment still “stuck with her.”
Though she was still yet to ultimately realise her songwriting talents, Mitski didn’t carry on the J-popstar path. Instead, she set off to New York to study composition. During this time, she would pen songs that still endure in her catalogue today, such as the sprightly ‘Strawberry Blond’ and the tender ‘Liquid Smooth’.
As she wrote more and more, she honed her talent for lyricism and for composition, proving her former manager wrong with each word and each chord. Every new album pushed her songwriting skills to new heights of production and poeticism, from the stirring soundscapes and intense vulnerability of ‘Your Best American Girl’ to the heavenly synth-pop of Laurel Hell.
Just over a decade later, Mitski may not have made it as a J-pop idol, but she has become one of the most admired and acclaimed songwriters in contemporary music. Her latest album, The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We, is the finest example of how much her talents have developed. It’s a gorgeous rumination on love in all of its forms, with orchestral instrumentation and that characteristic vulnerability.
It’s almost a comforting thought to know that one of the best songwriters of today once doubted her own abilities with a pen. Against the taunts of her talent manager, she has proven both him and her former self wrong, taking her rightful place as one of the leading lyricists in indie pop.
