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. … - 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.

I was always bothered when people say, 'I cry to your music, it sounds like a diary, it sounds so personal,'…Yes, it is personal. But that's so gendered. There's no feeling of, 'Oh, maybe she's a songwriter and she wrote this as a piece of art.'

People think I was writing it for a group of people, when actually I was writing about one person. The truth was, I loved this person so much, and us being from different worlds kept getting in the way.