Mitski's Nothing’s About To Happen To Me: Eleven Songs for the Space Between People
- Bernard Zuel
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
MITSKI
Nothing’s About To Happen To Me (Dead Oceans)
BACK WHEN I USED TO do a lot of travelling for work, occasionally in packs but much of it solo, with the daytimes filled with meetings or interviews or simply getting from one place to another in a strange city or a strange country, beginnings and ends of days had quite different versions of me.
At breakfast in the dining room or common area I wanted no one, no conversation or interactions. It’s not that I’m some anti-morning person – I would have been awake a couple of hours already by then, possibly a little too alert, and didn’t need coffee to become human or (sadly) a nicer version of me – but all I wanted was food, the newspaper and my own company.
But at night, the absence of a travelling companion always struck home as I would sit in my hotel room with something I’d brought in, occasionally in a restaurant hiding behind a book or eventually, as I softened/grew up/got bolder socially, in a bar, on a stool, with one drink I’d nurse until the discomfort (mine) sent me scurrying back to that room and some rubbish local television.
It was nighttime karmic revenge for morning misanthropy. Or maybe it was some lessons in being human, something that comes to mind each time I hear Mitski sing “Bars, such magic places, you can be with other people without having anyone at all”. And the fact is there is truth in this line, in more ways than one because sometimes, listening to this album feels like criss-crossing one of those bars, stumbling into or past conversations that didn’t begin tonight and won’t end any time soon.
The kind of conversations, or maybe muttered monologues not meant to be shared that reverberate, not because they are unexpected or unusual, startling in their revelations, but because of their very ordinariness. Because by very ordinary I mean very you or me, very now, very often – you or me if we were hurt and sharp-in-response to it; hurt and blunted-to-numbness by it; convinced we had a way through it if we thought it through; and perhaps most of all, if we were torn daily between our desire to be with people, and our distrust, dislike or just plain fear of being with people.
While Nothing is About To Happen To Me draws from each of the musical corners Mitski (Japanese-American Mitsuki Miyawaki, who we will see in Australia in May) has visited in her previous seven albums – strong strands of contemplative Americana, razored indie rock, bent folk music and grand orchestral gestures that climax a number of songs here – lyrically there is a common or at least familiar central character. This woman, maybe autobiographical, maybe not, is not in control. Not of herself, not of her circumstances. Often this leaves her curious and uncertain; sometimes it finds her emotionally dishevelled, accompanied by disconcertingly friendly accordion or scratchy vibrating electric guitars, but always it centres her in a time of flux.
In the fuzzbox-ahoy Where’s My Phone?, where a four-square beat and echoey voice seem to be revelling in a post-grunge nirvana, Mitksi’s very specific imagery suggests clarity and sanity: I got this, she seems to be saying, I can see what’s happening. But as the volume and density of instruments expands and the boundaries around them collapse in the final 30 seconds or so, that clarity disappears and so does any grip on control. She ain’t got this. Not at all.
Similarly, in I’ll Change For You, over a cocktail bar rhythm we begin with a quite reasonable evaluation of whether it is better to move on or attempt to rebuild with someone who is “the only other keeper of my most precious memories”. The languid delivery and flowing small chamber orchestration reflects a warmth from those precious memories and the prospect of a better future. But wait, there’s an edge developing in that voice, a strain showing beneath it, as she declares that she would do anything “for you to love me again”.
How far would she go? The declaration is unambiguous, but the ground it stands on is murky: “If you don’t like me now, I will change for you,” sings Mitski without tumbling into desperation but without losing the unspoken terror of one final repudiation, or the vestiges of self-respect, and indeed our respect, clinging on.
It’s a tricky temperature to balance for singer and listener, and you only get this effective by being this good. And Mitski is good – and succinct, with eleven songs in little more than 30 minutes – whether it is the mordant Seattle-isms of If I Leave (“If I leave somebody else will love you/But nobody else could forgive me quite as often as you”), the wide-twang guitar and whacked-toms in That White Cat which elevates itself to a Cale-meets-Bush moment of theatre, or the wind-in-the-wilderness with old school country treatments of Charon’s Obol.
At the end of the album, the end of the night, does this woman rescue herself? Is that even the point or the preferred option? Is the bar we’re in alone but with others a place to connect or to remind us of the very palpable disconnect? I could hazard a guess “but now they say they’re closing/So I’m loitering outside/Watching all the cars passing by/Like a kid waiting for my ride.”
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