every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end
In classic twitter style, a post highlighting the fact that the guy from Semisonic had a hand in the new Mitski song made the rounds upon the single’s release this week. It’s one of those things that makes you go “WHAT!?” and then if you think about it for an additional .2 seconds you might think “oh wait, yeah, that makes sense.” Not that the song quite strikes the same beats of “Closing Time,” but it’s at least somewhat common knowledge that Dan Wilson flexed his one-hit-wonder status into a full-on career in songwriting.
I will admit that I might not have gotten the: “a member of this 90’s one hit wonder band had a hand in writing Weezer’s California Kids, Adele’s Someone Like You, and Dixie Chick’s The Long Way Around” Jeopardy question right before dicking around on the guy’s website for 10 minutes yesterday but ANYWAYS. Like “Nobody” before it “The Only Heartbreaker” is a mammoth pop song that’s just a little off. Its soaring guitar line is undercut by Mitski’s penchant for making her musical phrases just rhythmically weird enough to trip up the listener on first pass, like a karaoke singer a little out of their depth with the song at hand speedily reading through the words as they pop up on screen.
I think this is what really sets Mistki apart. We are in the era of the Sad Banger, where everyone is poptimistic and no one’s mentally healthy. Mitski actually embeds that into the structure of the song. “Nobody” ends with a freakish key change and the middle of it has handclaps in the most random possible spot. It’s not one of those songs that you find out the lyrics to years later and think “oh that’s sad.” It exudes “unwell” on arrival. “Heartbreaker” does it again.
It’s going to be fascinating to see how the world takes on the Laurel Hell era of Mistki. Although the time of the “sellout” accusations is behind us in the music world for the most part, there’s still an ongoing theme where certain fans of certain “artsy” songwriters feign surprise that those artists have any knowledge of popular culture. Maybe Mistki is going to dabble further into “for the masses” sounds after all and maybe Dan Wilson will help vault that transition but one thing is certain—if anyone’s in on the joke, it’s Mitski.
-Donovan Burtan