Song Exploder - Mitski - Your Best American Girl

Episode Date: August 29, 2018

Mitski has been making records since 2012. Her third record, Puberty 2, came out in June 2016 and was critically acclaimed Pitchfork gave it Best New Music status. Her music has been featured in the tv show Adventure Time. In this episode, Mitski breaks down her song Your Best American Girl, along with her long-time collaborator Patrick Hyland.songexploder.net/mitski

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Hirway. I made an episode with Mitzki in 2016. Since then, she's gone on tour with Lord, and she sat in with the house band on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, and generally everyone's fallen in love with her. And this month, she put out a new record that's getting praised everywhere, the New York Times, pitchfork, the Guardian, everywhere. It's called Be the Cowboy, and it's great. So in honor of that new record, I wanted to go back to her episode from 2016 and re-listen to Mitzki talking about her process.

Here it is. Mitzky's been making records since 2012. Her newest record, Puberty 2, came out in June 2016 and was critically acclaimed. Pitchfork gave it Best New Music Status. Her music's also been featured in the TV show Adventure Time. In this episode, Mitzky breaks down the song Your Best American Girl, along with her longtime collaborator, Patrick Highland. My name's Mitzky.

My full name is Mitzki Miyawaki. I never grew up with musical instruments or with equipment to record. The way I learned to write was just writing things down on paper and hearing it in my head and kind of hoping for the best. And I don't work in a band, so I'm alone in my own head. So the lyrics and the vocal melody are king in my songs. They always come first. If I could, I'd be your little spoon and kiss your fingers forevermore.

But big spoon, you have so much to do and I have nothing. The chorus came first. I was on a bed and I wrote down the words. Your mother wouldn't approve of how. my mother raised me, but I do. I think I do. And you're an all-American boy. I guess I couldn't help trying to be your best American girl. I was in love with somebody, but I just felt like our backgrounds or the places we come from or how we were raised were just so completely different, and it felt like something that couldn't be overcome by love. I grew up very nomadically. I grew up

moving around a whole lot and not just in the U.S. but abroad. And my mother is Japanese and my father's American. And so I never grew up with a sense of community. My sense of family is very different. I think I grew up more with a sense of everything will be lost at some point. Like you have to prepare yourself to let go at all times because I just kept moving so much. And I kept, you know, you can only say goodbye. so many times before you start to like automatically prepare yourself for that.

So my upbringing was just very, very different from the average Americans. You're the sun, you've never seen the night, but you hear it song from the morning birds. Well, I'm not the moon, a star, but awake at night, I'll be seen. I wanted to be accepted by an environment or a family situation where, you know, people lived in the same place all their lives and knew the same people and know where they're from and know their place in the world. That was very foreign to me and I didn't feel like I could learn how to be part of that. The next thing is the baseline, so it's not even the chords. It's just kind of the roots. And then I kind of build off of that.

I picked up guitar in college, you know, so I just was too lazy to actually learn all the finger formations. And so what I do is actually just tune the guitar to a D major chord so that if you strum the guitar, just a D major chord immediately rings out. So I could just pick up the guitar and play simple chord progressions without thinking about it. I make things really loud in my headphones. and I think I was crouching over my guitar. So basically you can hear the click if you listen really closely. Patrick is really good at layering. I am Patrick Highland, and I produced and recorded and played instruments on the song.

Those synths that come in right before it hits, that was the most spontaneous thing in the song. The song was pretty much mixed and almost totally done, and then I just thought the transition from the verse. to the chorus was too abrupt. And so I thought to myself, how can I turn this awkward moment into its own event and make it a special thing? So with what the chords do there, this could sort of bloom into a big, lush thing right before the whole song explodes.

She sung that vocal, and then I'm manipulating the timbre. It's a formant shifter. I don't even think of it as a voice. I think of it as an instrument. Do... If you had to boil the song down to one moment, I would say it's when the first chorus hits, the intensity of that. For most of my quote-unquote career of playing music and performing it,

I've been doing it solo with either a piano or a guitar. So with literally just your voice in one instrument, your biggest asset is volume change. So from the beginning, like, I would use drastic changes in volume, changes in tone, to keep the audience's interest and keep the music going. So those things kind of become your band members. This is a Hallmark card, but really you always want what you can't have. And that All-American thing, like, from the day I was born, I could not enter that. How hard I tried, I could never enter that dream.

That All-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained. And so, yes, it's a sad song. but I wanted to make sure that it reflected all of the contrasting feelings. Like you can be heartbroken about a relationship, but also from it, realize that you are you and you're okay with who you are or you're okay about where you came from. And now here's Your Best American Girl by Mitzky in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.net to learn more about Mitzki and her music,

including a link to buy this song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs.

And this album is the product. of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Robe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzoukis, Josh Malone, Mnjana, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more.

They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of Song Exploder at SongExploder.net or wherever you download podcasts. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary, story-driven shows.

Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi-Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.