‘My Love Mine All Mine’: Exploring the evolution of Mitski’s depiction of love
“The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” shared Mitski in the press release for her latest album. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” It’s a philosophy she reaches on the record, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, but nowhere more clearly than on track seven, ‘My Love Mine All Mine’.
Over subdued instrumentals, Mitski asserts, “Nothing in the world belongs to me, but my love, mine all mine”. It’s a far calmer look at love than her discography has previously allowed for. The poetic lyrics reflect her growing understanding of the beauty and longevity of her own love and reluctant acceptance that she has no control over anyone else’s. The song lacks the desperation and insecurity of her previous lyrical longing – but how did she come to finally accept the inhospitality of love?
Mitski’s discography has taken a far more exhaustive look at love than many of her contemporaries – since beginning her career in 2012, she has penned countless love songs. Each album seems to act as a separate diary entry of her current meditations on the subject, as well as the loss and loneliness it can cause. To track the evolution of her perspective of love in the most concise way possible, we’ll be taking a look at just one exemplary song from each of her seven full-length records.
In 2012, Mitski self-released her debut studio record, Lush. The album demonstrates how Mitski’s unrelenting vulnerability has always pervaded her songwriting, primarily written in first person as if she was merely scribbling the first entry into that diary. Perhaps the most pertinent discussion of love on the record came in the form of the second track, titled ‘Wife’.
Over simplistic piano chords, Mitski sings, “I cannot bear you a son, but I will try, for if I am not yours, what am I?” Though the lyrics are almost as unembellished as the instrumentals, lacking the complexities and imagery of her current songwriting, the track does introduce a number of Mitski’s continued lyrical preoccupations – ownership, desperation, and identity. It even introduces imagery of stars and nature in its final line, “So let me go towards the morning star, with hope it won’t disappear”.
Just one year later, Mitski delivered Retired from Sad, New Career in Business. With fuller production, including orchestral elements, the album formed her senior project while she was studying at SUNY Purchase. One of the record’s standout tracks, ‘Strawberry Blonde’, recently became a TikTok phenomenon for its cottagecore adjacent instrumentals, but it also forms an essential entry into the Mitski love catalogue.
Far more upbeat and perky than ‘Wife’, but just as sad, Mitski sings of unrequited love and insecurity. Telling the story of her love for someone who loves another, she blends soft declarations of love, “I love everybody because I love you”, with devastating lines like, “You tell me you love her, I give you a grin”, and “Keep my eyes on the road as I ache”. It’s a juxtaposition of intimacy, and its power to hurt that has since dominated her songs.
Another year later, right on time, Mitski delivered yet another dose of sonic heartbreak with Bury Me at Makeout Creek. Detailing drunk walks home and continuing that star refrain, the album proved to be her best yet. The highlight of the record, when it comes to her discussion of love, is undoubtedly ‘First Love/Late Spring’. On the dense track, she switches out anxiety for avoidance, begging, “Please, hurry, leave me, I can’t breathe, please don’t say you love me”.
Rather than desperate, willingly giving out her love, Mitski seems to have retreated into herself. Still dependent on her lover, but with more fear for the consequences of it, she reflects the intensity of her feelings with violent lines like, “One word from you and I would jump off of this ledge I’m on, baby, tell me ‘Don’t’ so I can crawl back in”. It’s a devastating song punctuated by sparkling instrumentals.
It’s difficult to pick the most symbolic discussion of love from Mitski’s fourth full-length offering, Puberty 2, which arrived in 2016. Between ‘Once More to See You’, ‘I Bet on Losing Dogs’, and ‘Your Best American Girl’, the record is full to the brim with lonely love. Perhaps the greatest thematic development in the subject comes in ‘Your Best American Girl’, which provides a further look at Mitski’s own identity in relation to the subject.
With all her usual devotion and accompanying anxiety, Mitski opens the track offering to be her lover’s little spoon before lamenting, “But, big spoon, you have so much to do, and I have nothing ahead of me”. This self-deprecation continues into those usual heavenly references as she declares, “You’re the sun, you’ve never seen the night… I’m not the moon, I’m not even a star”.
But amidst the doubt and desperation, there are glimpses of Mitski’s increasing interest in her own identity and moments of self-acceptance. “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me, but I do, I think I do,” she declares in the chorus. Though she still tries her best to be the perfect all-American girl for her lover, there’s a growing understanding that perhaps that’s not the best way to attain real love.
In 2018, Mitski released Be the Cowboy, spawning even more lyrical contemplations on love and longing. It’s another record that’s dominated by the theme – the violent love depicted in ‘Washing Machine Heart’, the dependency of the married protagonist in ‘Me and My Husband’, the emotional game-playing in ‘Lonesome Love’ – but perhaps the biggest development in the subject comes at the album’s close.
On ‘Two Slow Dancers’, Mitski delivers her most developed discussion of love yet by looking backwards. Longing for the familiar smell of school gymnasiums and the simplicity of youthful love, but with an air of acceptance that those days are irretrievable, she laments, “It would be a hundred times easier if we were young again, but as it is and it is, we’re just two slow dancers last ones out”. To think that they could stay the same, she finally sees, is a hopeless cause.
In 2022, Mitski switched out melancholic indie folk in favour of a synth-pop-inspired sound on Laurel Hell. Accordingly, her discussion of love is slightly sweetened and simplified, too. On ‘That’s Our Lamp’, she again juxtaposes a light, bouncy soundtrack with the breakdown of a relationship. Finding herself in a situation where her partner loves her but no longer likes her, she utilises domestic imagery of lamps alongside heavenly imagery of moons.
Still, despite the failure of the relationship, there’s an air of acceptance in her stark words and optimistic instrumentals. “That’s where you loved me,” she repeatedly shrugs in the album’s final moments. It’s a simultaneously cathartic and melancholic reflection of a relationship that has reached its natural end.
Bringing us right up to date, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We provided Mitski’s most definitive sonic statement on love and her most serene. While ‘I Don’t Like My Mind’ reflects her enduring insecurities and struggles with self-acceptance and ‘Heaven’ shows her continued willingness to “bend like a willow” for her partner, the record still finds Mitski making peace with the inescapable difficulty of love.
Her most potent acceptance of love in all of its beauty and fragility comes in the aforementioned ‘My Love Mine All Mine’. Addressing her most familiar companion, the moon, Mitski attempts to immortalise her love, begging, “Moon, tell me if I could send up my heart to you? So, when I die, which I must do, could it shine down here with you?” Understanding how much the feeling is worth, in spite of the pain it causes, Mitski stakes her claim over her own love and longs for it to outlive her.
It’s a task we all strive to complete – to know that our love will outlast us, that it will shine down long after we’re gone – and it’s one Mitski certainly seems to have fulfilled. From the desperation and devotion of her early catalogue to her decision to relinquish control, her love will be forever immortalised in her lyrics.
