On Wednesday night at London’s Union Chapel, the only giveaway that we were in the presence of one of the biggest hits in the world was the sudden glow of phones recording from the pin drop-silent pews. As Mitski sang the gentle country ballad My Love Mine All Mine, the Japanese American songwriter swayed softly, held her heart and gazed at the church’s high carved ceiling as she asked the moon to preserve her earthly love and shine it down long after she’s gone. But the screams that followed were an unmistakable sign of the near religious devotion the 33-year-old commands, even before she climbed up to the pulpit for her encore.
That song, from Mitski Miyawaki’s acclaimed seventh album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, is now being played around 4m times a day on Spotify and is at No 12 in their global daily Top 50. It will probably hold fast for a second week at No 15 in the UK singles chart and is vaulting up the US Hot 100. Today (13 October), this strange, lunar ballad joins the likes of Olivia Rodrigo, Travis Scott and various high-speed club bangers on the BBC Radio 1 playlist.
My Love Mine All Mine is an unlikely success story: keeping company with big-ticket pop stars, it feels of a piece with breakout ballads such as Lana Del Rey’s Video Games or Rodrigo’s Drivers License. “This generation of listeners care less about which genre they align themselves with,” says the Icelandic jazz-pop star Laufey, 24, who shared a TikTok video of herself being overwhelmed by the song. “They focus on lyricism, community and how music makes them feel. It’s very encouraging to see a song like this soar.” Its prominence is also a surprise given Mitski’s antipathy towards the spotlight, a stance fostered by her initial experience of virality.
The rise of My Love Mine All Mine was fuelled by TikTok, where it is currently the platform’s most popular song. It isn’t her first hit on the site: in 2020, her kaleidoscopic pop song Nobody, then two years old, became a meme, soundtracking goofy clips of young people sprinting away from their problems. It broke her beyond an indie listenership enrapt by her “way of finding words for emotions you didn’t even know you had”, says Laufey. It changed the tenor of her fanbase, expanding to a younger faction who often characterised her as a “sad girl” thanks to her bleakly poetic lyrics and ratcheted the level of screaming at her gigs to quasi-Beatlemania levels. Rifts emerged between new and old fans and between Mitski and her obsessive admirers: she reported being grabbed at gigs and feeling exploited by the way her music was consumed, describing herself as a “black hole” for people to dump their feelings into.
Her 2022 album Laurel Hell was the last on her contract for US indie label Dead Oceans, and with its grim songs about her contract with the public – not to mention uneasy flirtations with a pop sound – was widely perceived as a retirement salvo. “That made the music hard to listen to,” says Pitchfork associate editor Cat Zhang, “because it felt like by supporting her, you were contributing to her suffering.” Soon after its release, Mitski asked people not to film her performances, which prompted a backlash from some fans who said their mental health circumstances necessitated filming as a memory aid. The request was deleted from her social media, which was run by her management after Mitski had quit posting in 2019 to protect her private life. At the end of the tour, she disappeared from view. So it was a surprise on many levels when she popped up on TikTok in July with the simple announcement that she was releasing a new album this autumn.
The spooked country sound of The Land Is Inhospitable … received widespread acclaim, with Guardian critic Alexis Petridis praising Mitski’s ability to “slip between the heartfelt and the sardonic without ever losing [her] grip on the listener” in a five-star review. But Mitski’s own promotion for the album has barely extended beyond brief TikTok videos about a few songs, one radio interview and a video about My Love Mine All Mine for the lyric-explainer website Genius. (“This is the first record where I absolutely stopped caring what people think,” she said in the clip. “Ironically, maybe that’s what people are the most attracted to.”) Jon Coombs is vice-president of A&R at Secretly Group, the parent company of Mitski’s label, Dead Oceans. “It was important for her for the focus to be on the music and on the songs,” he says. “She’s really proud of it.”
The album was led by the single Bug Like an Angel, a choir-buoyed strum about the uneasy comfort of alcohol. My Love Mine All Mine was the second single but an immediate favourite at the label, says Coombs. Mitski frequently sings about loneliness and insufficiency; when she sings about falling in love, she might liken it to falling “as fast as a body from the balcony”. My Love Mine All Mine, about wanting one’s love to live on for eternity, “is relatively straightforward and uncommon for her catalogue”, says Coombs. “Of course, it’s not paint-by-numbers. Mitski flips it on her head – it’s a love song about her own love.”
Mitski’s message of one’s love being the only thing anyone truly owns is resonant in an extractive consumer culture, says Zhang. “She’s showing us the value of giving ourselves freely in a world that conditions us to demand more, more, more.” And her singing to the moon raises the stakes: “She is asking us to reckon with the relative insignificance of our daily struggle and to invest in the only thing that can lend our existence a kind of cosmic meaning.”
With Mitski all but absent from the public eye, the growing ubiquity of My Love Mine All Mine has become a meta embodiment of the song’s desire for her love to exist outside of her, a stand-in for the boundary-conscious songwriter – who once toured wearing kneepads, underscoring the limits to which she would flay herself for an audience. Its streaming stats are growing daily, says Coombs, and connecting “in places that are uncommon for us to see a ton of engagement, like the Philippines, south-east Asia, Mexico”. There has been no single flashpoint propelling the song beyond the Mitski hardcore. “What’s so exciting is that we can’t point to one particular opportunity or country or partner,” says Coombs. “We’re just seeing this groundswell of people connecting with it across the board, regardless of how they’re first hearing it. I wish I had something to point to because then it would be easier to repeat.”
Hers is a singular success among complex female songwriters, too. Mitski has joked that her new album’s wordy title is indebted to Fiona Apple’s ornate way with a name; in the 90s, the prodigious US songwriter reached No 21 on the Hot 100 with Criminal, her lone singles chart placing. That decade Tori Amos and Björk often troubled the UK Top 40, but adventurous indie musicians haven’t thrived in the charts in the streaming era: comparable musicians such as St Vincent, Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen have never had a conventional hit; Phoebe Bridgers, the breakout indie star of recent years, has only dented the US singles chart as a guest on songs by superstars Taylor Swift and SZA. Why Mitski? “I keep going back to the strength of the song,” says Coombs. “She’s always had a very engaged fanbase that is pretty singular. I think it has to do with how her writing really strikes to the heart of her fans.”
Unlike some viral songs, where a single’s success doesn’t translate across the rest of the album, Mitski’s whole catalogue has been uplifted: before the release of The Land Is Inhospitable …, her monthly Spotify listening figures were around 10m, says Coombs. A month later, they stand at 18.9m. Her current tour of intimate venues sold out so quickly that Mitski implored fans not to buy vastly inflated resale tickets, with some listed for more than £300 on the secondary market. (One tell of her popularity: the bootleg merch sellers hawking terrible T-shirts outside Union Chapel, not something you often see at indie shows). On previous album cycles, Mitski broke from her own dates to support major pop stars Lorde and Harry Styles on their headline tours. As for Mitski’s coming year, “that’s not something that’s on my radar at the moment,” says Coombs. “The overwhelming majority of the shows on this upcoming run are going to be seated theatres. It makes for a listening experience where you can really listen and absorb the songs.”
It speaks to Mitski’s desire to reset the terms of engagement with her fans, a challenge that many musicians attempt and fail (Doja Cat is currently leading an offensive against hers), and a feat that may seem unlikely as her profile is higher than ever. But Mitski’s seem to be listening. At the US shows before this UK run, says Coombs, the screaming had stopped and the audience was silent. And the most-watched TikTok interactions with My Love … are noticeably different from her many previous viral songs. Rather than subverting it, many listeners are taking it as a prompt to share their emotional responses and experiences of love.
The song probably went viral because of its relative simplicity compared with the other songs on an open-ended and existential record, says Zhang. But it’s also consoling young people “who feel romantically lost and confused”, she says. “The sentiment is: even if someone didn’t value the love you gave them, that doesn’t mean that it was a waste. She’s lending dignity to the act of devotion, when we are taught that it is shameful to expend so much energy on others.”
Appreciating the dignity in devotion might also apply to Mitski’s renewed fondness for her fans. She told NPR that she never intended to quit music altogether after Laurel Hell, but questioned whether she should continue working in the public eye. “But, eventually, I kind of looked around and realised just how lucky I was to get to create the music I want to make and have my music reach other people,” she said. “And I just realised: you know what? I need to buckle up in a sense, and just take all of the good that comes with the bad.”
Outside Union Chapel on Wednesday afternoon, Ogulcan (17), Abbie (16), Rosa (22) and Shenel (17) are sheltering under umbrellas and blankets at the front of the queue for the unreserved seating, having arrived at 6am. Rosa, who travelled from Madrid, mentions an infamous incident in the Mitski fandom. “At a show seven years ago somebody yelled at her, ‘I love you!’ and she said, ‘You don’t know me.’ But two days ago in Manchester, she was like, ‘I really do love you, I think it’s possible even though we don’t know each other.’ That was really nice.”
Watching from the balcony, I spot the four in their well-earned front-centre spot, as Mitski performs a spellbinding acoustic set with two musicians playing acoustic guitar and double bass. They do the entire new album in order to a transfixed, utterly silent audience, who cheer ecstatically in polite bursts after each song. Mitski says very little, pacing the stage in all black, other than to thank the crowd and joke about how much she’d like to haunt the chapel. “OK,” she says after that, “let’s get back into character,” lightly mocking her own preference for distance.
After The Land Is Inhospitable … closer I Love Me After You, she introduces an encore of some of her greatest hits. “Feel free to sing along if you’d like,” she says. “It is a church after all, it’ll be nice to hear a lot of voices singing, if you don’t mind.” And she and the congregation sing in perfect harmony.
