Mitski – “Your Best American Girl”

Mitski – “Your Best American Girl”

The most beautiful moments on Mitski Miyawaki’s most recent album, Bury Me At Makeout Creek, are the imperfect ones. Her voice shakes and cracks and trembles throughout, not because she’s suffering from a momentary lapse of control, but because many of the songs on the album represent a devastating purging of sorts. In some ways, the album is an experiment in dichotomy. Mitski’s voice takes on a sing-song, lullaby-ish quality on “I Don’t Smoke” and it ascends to a raw, outraged howl midway through the album on “Drunk Walk Home.” The closing track, “Last Words Of A Shooting Star,” is a meditation on mortality delivered with a melancholic whisper. You can hear a formidable confidence in all of them, but that tenacity is presented in so many different ways that there has never really been one type of Mitski song. With each new release, she offers us dozens of versions of herself.

Today we’re presented with yet another iteration of the songwriter. “Your Best American Girl” is all about insurmountable aspirations; trying and failing and trying again to mold yourself into something for the benefit of someone else. It begins with the best spooning reference of 2016 so far (take that Macklemore!) as Mitski describes the kind of relationship she imagines for herself before the chorus builds itself into an unexpected, but wholly welcome wall of distortion. “Your mother wouldn’t approve/ Of how my mother raised me/ But I do, I think I do,” she sings, before submitting to a revelation. “And you’re an all-American boy/ I guess I couldn’t help/ Trying to be/ Your best American girl.” This is the first single off of Mitski’s forthcoming album Puberty 2, which will be out this summer via Dead Oceans. Listen below.

01 “Happy”
02 “Dan the Dancer”
03 “Once More To See You”
04 “Fireworks”
05 “Your Best American Girl”
06 “I Bet on Losing Dogs”
07 “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars”
08 “Thursday Girl”
09 “A Loving Feeling”
10 “Crack Baby”
11 “A Burning Hill”

Puberty 2 is out 6/17 via Dead Oceans.

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