Day 407: Mitski – Retired from Sad, New Career in Business

Today is a big day: I’m listening to Mitski, which is always a big day for me – not necessarily a happy one, but a big one. I’m feeling a bit more sluggish than usual at the moment and can’t really handle a long, cerebral album, but a 24-minute cerebral album I’m sure I can probably deal with no problem.

Album cover courtesy of Mitski

I’ve written about Mitski before on day 196 and day 277, but this is the earliest project of hers that I’ve covered. Retired from Sad, New Career in Business was released in 2013 as Mitski’s senior project when she was studying music composition at Purchase College, and it features her with a 60-piece student orchestra. It was written by her and self-released on her Bandcamp, and it was the last album she released without a label.

Retired from Sad, New Career in Business is nothing short of amazing, but I’d expect nothing less. Hearing that it’s her senior project, you’d expect it to be just something to listen to as a curiosity to see where she came from as a singer and a songwriter, but this one is actually just very good on its own. Something like “Class of 2013” or even “Square” is deceptively simple, but just punches you in the gut on the strength of her writing.

And man, can you imagine this being your senior project at university? To be able to be at this level as an artist when you’re only 23 must be bonkers. And it’s not even that she’d been writing songs since she was a child and had more than a decade of practice, she wrote her first song at 18. She has this ability to translate her inner world with such sharpness that you feel like you’re there in her head, and she clearly had that skill even back when she was a student. Listening to her sometimes feels like touching a raw nerve but in a way where you want to do it over and over again.

Mitski, man, I just love her. Retired from Sad, New Career in Business gets a 9/10.