The Mitski song about the time she “fucking broke down”
Mitski is a master of musical melancholy. Her discography blends intimate indie rock soundscapes and achingly vulnerable lyrics, forming a sonic diary containing all of her hurt and heartbreaks. With an arsenal of metaphors at her disposal spanning washing machine hearts and betting on losing dogs, Mitski has turned her pain into poetry.
Many of her songs contain the desperation and distress of a woman in the throes of a breakdown. From the dramatic devotion of ‘Me and My Husband’ to the weighty ‘First Love/Late Spring’, her intricate lyrics are often plagued by isolation and neuroses. One of the most prominent and popular examples of this is her 2018 single, ‘Nobody’.
Over pulsing hi-hats and bright piano chords, Mitski declares, “My God, I’m so lonely, so I open the window to hear sounds of people”. By the end of the track, the lyrics devolve into unrelenting repetition of the title. As Mitski slowly sings “nobody” over and over, it’s impossible to escape her loneliness. Perhaps this is because of the isolation she felt while writing it.
Explaining the meaning behind the track to Genius, Mitski stated: “I am too proud to be hysterical to other people, but the chorus ‘Nobody’ was literally me in a semi-fugue state on my hands and knees on the floor just crying and just repeating the word, ‘nobody’. And then I don’t know, I was like, ‘Let me use this pain and exploit it for my money’.”
Mitski’s breakdown was induced by the isolation she felt spending the holiday season alone, on a different continent to any of her family and friends. After completing her tour of Asia and Australia, she found that flight prices had increased so much with the season that it was cheaper for her to stay there.
Mitski then spent the period in Malaysia, one of many countries she grew up in, but it didn’t have the familiarity she craved: “I went to Malaysia, where I spend a lot of my childhood and I thought it would be great, like finally get to decompress, except I didn’t prepare for how fricking lovely it would be to just be all alone in a country where no one knows me, while everyone else I know is having holidays with their family and friends.”
The singer-songwriter continued: “I was also really tired and just the idea of everybody I know being at a different time zone and having holidays without me – it was just a combination of a lot of things. But yeah, I fucking broke down.” As a result, she penned a heartbreaking hit in ‘Nobody’.
