In late 2021, on the eve of releasing her sixth album Laurel Hell, Mitski gave an interview to Rolling Stone in which she explained where she’d been for the past two years.
Since putting out the critically acclaimed Be the Cowboy, the singer-songwriter had quietly stepped away from music. She quit touring, deleted her social media and generally took herself off to somewhere else for a while. When asked what had led her to quietly quit, she basically pointed towards burnout: “In order for me to survive in the music industry as it exists I had to stuff a pillow over my heart and tell it to stop screaming. I had to be like, ‘Shut up, shut up, take it.’”
It was certainly a surprise. By most of the metrics that the world judges success, Mitski was killing it. By 2018 she had the world at her feet, the proud owner of one of the most emotionally precise bodies of work of the past decade – songs that could make a stranger feel completely understood without ever feeling pandered to. What’s more,…
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