Quotes from Mitski

I'd always been fascinated by death, which sounds so morbid. Especially being a woman trying to make music, I think there's a sense that you're never young enough, or your career is going to end soon.

I guess you can say I 'do the Twist.' I like playful dance moves that aren't too serious.

You can never learn enough about music.

I don't want to be a musician's musician. I want to be an everyone's musician.

I hope to be a writer and musician my whole life, fingers crossed.

A lot of musicians talk about how they were into music from the start; they always wanted to be musicians. It wasn't like that for me. I didn't think of it as a job or a career - it was just something that was constant.

Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.

I'm Japanese, and I'm also white American, and neither camp wants me in their camp.

I really just care about making music and how I can make it next.

In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I'd never stayed in one place for so long.

I don't care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.

If I have a song where I hit some really high notes, I want to try to bring in equivalently low notes somewhere in there.

I don't really listen to pop-country, but I like really, really old country that's closer to folk. Like Johnny Cash, who is considered country.

I tend to kind of try to use what's in my environment to the best of my ability rather than seek out things that I don't already have.

Being an outsider at all times is both unhealthy and useful, because you become much more objective about things.

I was a film major because, for some reason, I thought that that was a creative job that had more job opportunities. I don't know what logic I was following, but that was my impression at the time.

Often I've had problems automatically bending to a lover's will, becoming what I know they want me to be. Immediately, I learn all the music they love, listen to it, study it, instead of being like, 'This is what I love!'

I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that's important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way.