This Saturday, my friend and I drove to New York City to see Mitski. After a whirlwind of a drive and dinner with my parents, we headed toward the venue, cutting across the streets with haste. We were entering the part of New York that I consider to be the excesses, where the subway lines barely reach and reflective office buildings amass. It was a foggy night; skyscrapers plunged into an obscure sky.
My friend and I were headed towards The Shed in Hudson Yards. The stage was decorated to resemble a home, with a desk on the left and a couch on the right. As we waited for the indie rock star to emerge, I looked up at the faraway ceiling and felt small.
This was my third Mitski concert. My first was in 2022 in New York City, and my second in 2024 in Cleveland. I’ve unintentionally structured my life to see her every two years. The main change I’ve noticed is that Mitski’s fan base is growing up. Although there were the usual teenagers surrounding me, I also saw a variety of millennials and even some older adults, too.
Mitski’s current tour marks the recent release of her newest album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, exploring solitude and yearning. She opened the concert with “In a Lake,” the first song of the record. The song begins with a small-town feel, evoked by a simple guitar strumming pattern accompanied by a banjo and an accordion. The music later expands into something larger with an ecstatic eruption of orchestral instruments. “In a Lake” gives a good sense of what the rest of the album holds: deliberate reflection and loud, emotional release.
Mitski sings with great restraint. It’s as if the song is a fragile sphere that she holds in her hands, rotating it carefully so as not to break it; she dances in a similar way, in slow, thought-out movements. I’ve seen Mitski dance more in past concerts. This time, she mostly stood in front of the mic, making small movements. Every once in a while, she would run across the floor with a burst of energy. She often sat on the couch painedly. I got the impression that she didn’t want to burn herself out. Still, she performed dutifully, and gave us the songs we wanted.
Mitski is inspired by Japanese avant-garde butoh dancers, who paint themselves white and dance with slow, considered movements. The white is meant to erase butoh dancers into a neutral form, so that audiences will perceive their dancing styles rather than the individual. Although I’ve never seen Mitski painted white, the influence of that white paint is imbued in her style. She erases herself by giving nothing personal to the audience; her art is about her art and not her. When Mitski briefly talked, I found that her speech lacked substance. She said that those of us standing in the pit should remember to stretch our legs. She told us that if there is little light in our lives, we can find that light inside ourselves. I nodded. She had said nothing wrong, mostly because she had barely said anything at all. Mitski has never given herself to her fans.
I’m grateful I made it to her concert and the past two as well. However, I always leave her concerts feeling like I would have preferred to listen to her music alone with my headphones on. Some audience members sang along off-key and talked loudly during songs. I’m all for dancing and rowdiness, but Mitski doesn’t perform the kind of music that welcomes that. Loneliness blasted on speakers and illuminated by strobe lights will always feel odd.
After performing “In a Lake,” Mitski blazed through a line-up of other great songs, mostly from her newest album and her other recent album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. Although I had the murmuring desire to listen to her alone, I had to appreciate how transcendent her voice sounds live, especially during her song “Heaven.” As she reached notes clear as glass, lines of foggy light immersed her with a lake-light effect. It was sublime.
My friend and I broke the drive to New York City into two parts. On Friday, we camped out by a lake in Pennsylvania, and the next day, we finished the drive. We couldn’t swim in the lake because it was frozen over, but we did brush our teeth near it in the morning. I felt Mitski’s lyrics to “In a Lake” in that quiet moment: “But in a lake, you can backstroke forever / The sky before you, and the dark behind you.” Mitski’s music illuminates the silences that we all experience, which is why so many hold her music close to their chests.
