Mitski’s most American album: “That’s kind of what makes America what it is”
Mitski‘s seventh record, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, released last year, was influenced by country, folk, classical music and Americana, blending it in with her signature indie-rock sound. It was a shift away from her previous album, 2022’s electrifying and synth-heavy Laurel Hell, this time opting for a more minimal musical approach, zeroing in on vocals and emphasizing her signature intimate songwriting style.
Mitski drew from spaghetti western soundtracks, Arthur Russell, Scott Walker, Igor Stravinsky, Caetano Veloso and Faron Young. Songs like ‘The Frost’ and ‘Buffalo Replaced’ capture the country influence, as well as the opening of ‘Heaven’ and the acoustic strumming of ‘I’m Your Man’.
But it wasn’t just the sound that embraced Americana. In an interview with NPR around the time the album was released, Mitski spoke about how The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We reflected her thoughts on American identity.
“I’m always trying to figure out what it means to be American,” she told NPR. “But especially with this album, I think I’m trying to reconcile all my various identities with being American today. I feel like I’ve always been seeing my own identities through the eyes of other people who haven’t lived my identities. And I kind of think maybe that’s also very uniquely American.”
She went on to explain how this connects to her own background. “I’m Asian American,” she continued. “I’m half white, half Asian. And so I don’t really fit into either community very well. I am an Other in America, even though I am American. And I almost feel like a majority of Americans are actually other, and that’s kind of what makes America what it is.”
This meditation on what it means to be American has come up before in Mitski’s work. In ‘Your Best American Girl’, off of 2016’s Puberty 2, Mitski sings, “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me/ But I do, I think I do/ And you’re an all-American boy/ I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl,” her modulated vocals blaring over distorted guitars.
Speaking to NPR, Mitski also described how the title of her seventh album came to her as a joke. She imagined a sign that, instead of welcoming someone to a new state, said, “The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We.” The musician explained: “It’s feeling really inhospitable in the United States right now”.
Following in the storytelling tradition of country music and connecting to the plurality of American identities she addressed, she also spoke about how she invented narratives and embodied different characters throughout The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We. “Sometimes fiction or made-up stories is actually the best path towards speaking some sort of personal truth,” she said. “So I am all of these characters. In my mind, all of these songs are true in essence. But I’m just putting it through a character that doesn’t exist or a narrative that didn’t happen because that happens to be the best way to express how I really feel.”
The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We came in at second place on Far Out‘s list of the best albums of 2023 and also boasts the singles ‘Bug Like An Angel’ and the TikTok-viral ‘My Love Mine All Mine’.
