Japanese American singer-songwriter Mitski Miyawaki says her identity is made up of “a million selves” that defy categorization — and fans are saying they find inspiration in that.
“I don’t have a self,” Mitski said on the website for her record label. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.”
“The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” Mitski’s newest album, released last week by music label Dead Oceans, explores her multitude of selves, she says. Featuring a choir and orchestral arrangements, the album draws from classic Americana imagery such as freight trains, buffalo stampedes and highway cars.
With this album, Mitski is trying to “reconcile all my various identities with being American,” she said in an interview with NPR. “I’m Asian American. I’m half white, half Asian. And so I don’t really fit into either community very well. I am an other in America, even though I am American.”
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Japanese American singer-songwriter Mitski Miyawaki says her identity is made up of “a million selves” that defy categorization — and fans are saying they find inspiration in that.
“The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” Mitski’s newest album, released last week by music label Dead Oceans, explores her multitude of selves, she says.
Featuring a choir and orchestral arrangements, the album draws from classic Americana imagery such as freight trains, buffalo stampedes and highway cars.
In it, she sings of an aching loneliness after the loss of a friend: “Now the world is mine alone / With no one, no one to share the memory.” The song ends with the narrator all alone, saying: “It’s just witness-less me.”
Ariana Swei, who identifies as queer and uses they/them pronouns, is a 23-year-old mixed media artist from Connecticut, now living in Brooklyn, New York.
I’m not super close with my family in Taiwan, and I feel a disconnect with my parents, partly because my mom experienced coming here as an immigrant and I didn’t.”
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