YOU’RE IN FOR a musical delight if you’ve already bought your tickets to see the magnificent Mitski next month when she plays in Dublin’s Tivoli Theatre (known to many of you as District 8).

For those of you who need a little bit more persuasion to see the Japanese-American singer, here’s 5 song lyrics that will cut you to your core and leave you bleeding in a heartbroken heap.

1. Nobody – Mitski

And I don’t want your pity I just want somebody near me.

Mitski’s most played song on Spotify with 2.38 million listens is off her latest album, Be the Cowboy, which was released this month. The song has themes of loneliness and alienation, but there’s an infectious disco beat that you can’t help but move to.

In an interview, Mitski explained what the song was about:

I had just finished my Asia and Australia tour. It was right before the winter holiday’s and it was actually cheaper for me to stay on that side of the world, than to try to fly back on holiday prices to the U. S., so I just stayed on that side.

I went to Malaysia, where I spent a lot of my childhood and I thought it would be great, like finally get to decompress, except I didn’t prepare for how fricking lonely it would be to just be all alone in a country where no one knows me, while everyone else I know is having holiday’s with their family and friends.

I was also really tired and just the idea of everybody I know being at a different time zone and having holidays without me–it was just a combination of a lot of things. But yeah, I fucking broke down.

2. Two Slow Dancers

This is the closing track and third single off Be the Cowboy.

In her own words Mitski said this song is about two old lovers who have reunited to reflect on their adolescent intimacy:

They used to have something together that is no longer there and they’re trying to relive it in a dance, knowing that they’ll have to go home and go back to their lives.

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It would be a hundred times easier

If we were young again

But as it is

And it is

We’re just two slow dancers, last ones out

‘Hear that, gal? You can actually pinpoint the second when your heart rips in half’…

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3. First Love / Late Spring

Alert: This will hit you hard if you’re going through a quarter life crisis.

And I was so young when I behaved twenty five. Yet now I find I’ve grown into a tall child.

Mitski here is referring to how when we are young we’re chopping at the bit to act older than our age, and then when 25 hits us like a train we feel like we are utter children.

4. I Bet On Losing Dogs

I bet on losing dogs
I know they’re losing and I pay for my place
By the ring
Where I’ll be looking in their eyes when they’re down
I’ll be there on their side
I’m losing by their side

Mitski here just cannot help herself.

She involves herself in relationships that she knows are doomed to fail.

Relatable.

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We all can fall into harmful patterns of behaviour that aren’t healthy for us, especially when it comes to choosing our other halves.

5. Your Best American Girl

You know that sinking feeling you felt when you watched your Gaeltacht crush shift the face off some other young wan at the Ceili Mór? The adult equivalent, for you English-speaking heathens, would be seeing it at a music festival like Electric Picnic?

Well Mitski’s bottled that feeling and put it into a music video and song.

YouTube / Vevo YouTube / Vevo / Vevo

Mitski’s most watched video on Youtube is a very simple concept but brilliant in its execution of displaying the songs themes: unrequited love and cultural appropriation.

Yeah…that’s right.

Mitski went there. She combined those two things into a song.

It’s the Mitski equivalent of Solange’s ‘Don’t Touch My Hair’, but whereas Solange is warning people off touching her, Mitski is aching to be ‘wanted’.

You’re the sun, you’ve never seen the night. But you hear its song from the morning birds. Well I’m not the moon, I’m not even a star. But awake at night I’ll be singing to the birds.

Mitski is due to play at the Tivoli Theatre in Dublin on 22nd September.

The tickets are priced at €22.50 including booking fee, which is much cheaper than a therapist’s session.

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