Mitski
I can't read in a car, because I'll get sick. It's almost instant.Collection: Car
I don't think I'm alone in this: I'm obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment.Collection: Alone
I think people don't realize how little of being an artist is making art.Collection: Art
When you're an adult, things mellow out. I think when you're a teenager and you are sad and the world is ending, everything is about that one sadness.Collection: Sad
When you love someone and care about them, you want what's best for them, and it's always the hardest thing to realize maybe you aren't what's best for them, how hard you try.Collection: Love
You can be heartbroken about a relationship but also, from it, realize you are you, and you're okay with who you are or where you came from.Collection: Relationship
Music was the one thing that was just mine, and no one could take it from me. I created it, dictated it, and it made me not able to let go of it.Collection: Music
On tour, people know that if they ever ask me what I want to eat, I will always say Asian food. I'm becoming a stereotype, but it's what I want to eat. I want to eat rice.Collection: Food
You can never learn enough about music.Collection: Music
There's this myth that women are supposed to compete with each other or something, or we're supposed to hate each other, and that's totally not productive.Collection: Women
I understand that, because there are so many musicians, you have to make artists into brands, but I sometimes feel like I have to be some kind of non-human icon in order for people to listen to my music.Collection: Music
I've been asked whether I have a hobby, and have felt strangely offended that anyone would assume I have the time.Collection: Time
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.
I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn't last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn't have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.
With solo shows, you have complete control over the set list. If you feel like you want to do something different or do a new song, you can just work it in. You can talk to the audience or not talk to the audience. There's nothing that's set.
I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously.
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.
I don't want to be elitist.
I always have strong urges to sabotage myself. Whenever someone says they like something about my music, I tend to not want to do that anymore. It's not even that I don't like it anymore: it's that I keep trying to find ways for people to dislike me.
I'm so smart. I am good at doing math really quickly in my head.
I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.
I think what's hard for me is not that I don't get downtime to chill, it's that I don't get time to make music.
I don't set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it's about.
I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there's more people in the audience than I'm used to.
Tour isn't good for writing, but it's good for inspiration.
I feel like I've always wanted to live in one place and stay in one place, but I always end up choosing things that make me travel.
What's important to me is that my songs can exist without any material anything. It's very reflective of my ideology.
Honestly, in the music business, it's all about being cool or being the newest thing or being the 'It' person, and I've tried really hard to be what is expected of me or what would be advantageous to my career, and I just reached the point where I said, 'No, I'm an emotional loser. I can't pretend to not care.'
I have this thing about being acknowledged and accepted by institutions.
On tour, I don't drink, because I don't think in any other job you are supposed to get to work and drink whisky.
When someone is a musician - trying to make a living off being a public figure - it's really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn't have a personal life.
I hope to be a writer and musician my whole life, fingers crossed.
I guess you can say I 'do the Twist.' I like playful dance moves that aren't too serious.
I really like The Cars. They're just so over the top and super pop, but I don't feel guilty. I'm proud of all the music I listen to.
It would actually feel forced or unnatural to try to do a different singing style or to try to change my sound completely.
I hate that my opinions are gonna be on record... that my opinions of other artists are going to be on record.
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.
Pop artists work really hard, and they might not work for the same things that indie artists do, but they're still musicians, and they're still making art.
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 couldn't wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn't actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don't really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that's what I wanted to do.
Sometimes when I perform, and it's obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it.
I really just care about making music and how I can make it next.
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.
I've stopped wanting a home, I think, because I've been on tour all my life, basically.
I try to be regimented and try to stay healthy and work out and eat properly and go to sleep. And not get too caught up in the industry in my regular life, so I can save all my expression and energy for my art.
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.
The whole 'grunge-girl' comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.
If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.
You always want what you can't have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born, I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.
When you're doing something you're not used to, you kind of realize that you're still a kid: even though the whole world around you sees you as an adult and you're expected to act like an adult, you still haven't actually grown up.