…this song is quite autobiographical because I didn't grow up in the U.S. I am half Japanese, and it came from wanting to just fit into this very Ame… - 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. So there’s that element of ‘I’m going to die soon.’ Maybe not physically, but I’m going to run out of time very soon. It’s always on my mind. I have to do things now.

In tenth grade—this says a lot about how developmentally delayed I was—I had in my mind that it was the proper thing for me to have a love interest. And you'd see in movies where two characters instantly see each other and are, like, I'm in love!, and then it just cuts to them on a date or interacting...A lot of my adolescence was like that. Me thinking I was doing the right thing by re-creating a movie scene that I'd seen but then realizing that's not how it happens in real life.

It was right around Christmas… and it was kind of too expensive for me to try to fly back from Australia to the U.S. on holiday prices, so I just decided to stay in that side of the world. I went to Malaysia instead…I thought it would be a great vacation, but I went alone, and I went during the holidays when everyone else is spending time with their families, and so, long story short, I ended up feeling incredibly, devastatingly alone… I think of myself as, you know, a very solitary, kind of introverted person, so I didn't plan for loneliness, and then it just happened and I didn't know what to do about it. So I wrote a song.