I remember I took a music course in junior year of high school, and some girl brought in 'Teardrops On My Guitar,' and she was like, 'Isn't this song great?' And everyone was like, 'Who's Taylor Swift?' And now, every time I listen to Taylor Swift, I remember that moment.
Mitski
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.
Being an outsider at all times is both unhealthy and useful, because you become much more objective about things.
I have a very conveniently photographic memory of emotions - it's overwhelming, because things don't fade for me.
I know for a fact that I'm problematic. I shouldn't be looked to for any kind of guidance.
Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.
When you are a minority, it's your job to bend, and when you love someone, you really want to make it work. Then you start to realise, 'Oh, I'm bending a lot,' and they're just standing there existing, and I'm bending around them. But you can't blame them: they don't realise it; that's just how they already existed. It's hard.
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.
I guess you can say I 'do the Twist.' I like playful dance moves that aren't too serious.
When you're young is the one time when you get to indulge in being morose and take yourself most seriously.
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.
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'm punk, but I love gold.
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.
My personality's very obsessive-compulsive. I tend to fixate a lot.
All I want to do at karaoke is sing Mariah Carey.
I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn't identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.
Oftentimes, the most important decisions I make are the ones I don't put much thought into.
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.
As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.
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.
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.
It's nice to know there's a big world with many perspectives. I tend to get so stuck in my own small world easily, and going out into the world reminds me that I'm not the center of the world - in a good way.
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.
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.
What's important to me is that my songs can exist without any material anything. It's very reflective of my ideology.
Everything is so chaotic and messy in the world, and I have always felt kind of dirty.
I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there's more people in the audience than I'm used to.
I've been very careful to always make clear that I am a real person. That's why I'm on social media a lot.
The whole 'grunge-girl' comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.
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.
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 don't think 'bleak' is a bad thing.
I didn't fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive, I created this 'ideal America.' Finally I came to the U.S. and realised, 'Oh, I don't belong here, either.'
I think your ego gets in the way of making something good because it kind of blinds you from the actual art.
I would love for Rivers Cuomo to listen to my music and see what he thinks.
I have this thing about being acknowledged and accepted by institutions.
I hate that my opinions are gonna be on record... that my opinions of other artists are going to be on record.
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.
I've been asked whether I have a hobby, and have felt strangely offended that anyone would assume I have the time.
It's very tempting, when somebody says they like this about you, to want to do that over and over.
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.
Tour isn't good for writing, but it's good for inspiration.
I don't care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.
On one hand, I think it's very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it's not talked about, then we won't progress. What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.
When I started making music, I was like, 'This is something I can believe I was meant to do.'
I hope to be a writer and musician my whole life, fingers crossed.
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 a musician's musician. I want to be an everyone's musician.
I can't read in a car, because I'll get sick. It's almost instant.
