Mitski | Artist
Mitsuki Laycock-Miyawaki aka Mitski is a Japanese-American singer and songwriter born 1990 in Mie Prefecture, Japan. Known for her candid lyrics and a catchy yet volatile version of indie, she was dubbed by The Guardian in 2022 the "best young songwriter" in the United States. Mitski is the child of an American father and a Japanese mother, and her first language was Japanese. She moved frequently while growing up due to her father's job at the US Department of State, living in many countries before settling in the United States. After enrolling at Hunter College to study film, Mitski decided to pursue music and transferred to SUNY Purchase College's Conservatory of Music, where she studied studio composition. During her time at Purchase, she recorded and self-released her piano-based first and second albums, Lush (2012) and Retired from Sad, New Career in Business (2013), as student projects. After graduating, she was vocalist for the short-lived prog-metal band Voice Coils and began work on her third studio album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, which was released in November 2014. The album was reissued with four bonus tracks in April 2015, on Don Giovanni Records. The album's raw, impulsive guitar represented a departure from the orchestral and classical piano sounds of her first two albums. It garnered acclaim from numerous publications, however it failed to become a significant commercial success. Mitski signed with Dead Oceans in 2015 and released albums Puberty 2, Be the Cowboy, and Laurel Hell, the last of which made the top ten in several countries. That same year, she co-wrote "This Is a Life" for the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. Her seventh studio album The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We was released in 2023. The album's third single, "My Love Mine All Mine", became Mitski's first song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100. Of her studio albums to-date, standouts include Bury me at Makeout Creek (2014), Puberty 2 (2016), Be the Cowboy (2018), and The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (2023). Also recommended is 2015's Mitski on Audiotree Live. In terms of her musical style, critic E. Alex Jung described her as "an artist whose music feels like being ushered into a private opera house of melodrama" with lyrics full of "roiling fury, destructive impulses, humiliation, longing, heartache, and hunger". While Angie Martoccio of Rolling Stone described her albums as a "wry running commentary on twenty-something angst, raw desire, and often unrequited love." In a 2016 interview with The NY Times, Mitski described the tension that comes with being in the public eye. Since her breakthrough in 2014, she has closely guarded her privacy and is not active on Social Media. In September 2019, at a show in Central Park, Mitski announced it would be her last show indefinitely, causing great distress to her fanbase. She stated her main reason for quitting was that she had a difficult time grappling with newfound indie stardom when her 2018 album Be the Cowboy hit the mainstream, saying that the music industry felt like a "super-saturated version of consumerism", and that in the industry "you have to be a product that's being bought and sold and consumed." Since 2020, Mitski has resided in Nashville, Tennessee. She enjoys vegan baking, likes horror films, and has two pet cats
Artist Website: mitski.com
Featured Albums: Mitski
Related Artists: Voice Coils
Collections: Movers Shakers
