There are a lot of unhappy people in the songs on Mitski’s new album. Some of them are Mitski herself, but not all. Belying the usual assumption that any woman who writes first-person lyrics is singing about herself, the 27-year-old singer-songwriter has said that many of the songs on Be the Cowboy are experiments in writing fiction. Let’s call it a successful experiment.
She imagined her fictional character as “a very controlled, icy, repressed woman who is starting to unravel.” The songs here aren’t as straightforward as that, however: Mitski is a master of insinuation and inference. So when she sighs heavily at the start of “Me and My Husband,” and then sings on the chorus, “We are doing better / It’s always been just him and me / Together,” you can practically see the narrator’s tight, forced smile as she clings to a self-identity that is fully invested in a mate who has lost interest.
It’s brutally subtle and surgically precise, a talent she demonstrates again and again. The woman on “Lonesome Love” sets out meet up with an ex to “win” their breakup, and finds herself the next morning “in a taxi / I’m so very paying for,” eight words that imply an entire story that Mitski never explicitly spells out. By contrast, “Remember My Name” is the less opaque lament of a performer who doesn’t quite know what she needs to be happy, or at least satisfied, as scuzzy guitars scrape like an irritant over a stuttering beat. “Nobody” comes from personal experience. Mitski wrote the song after she was overcome by loneliness during a holiday season she spent by herself in Malaysia, though a solid dance groove kicks in after a minute to mitigate her self-pity.