MITSKI with SHARON VAN ETTEN
Hollywood Bowl
Los Angeles
September 28, 2024
“I feel like performing live is practice for living and dying,” Mitski declares several songs into her sold-out show at the Hollywood Bowl. She goes on to explain that in performance, she experiences it all: ecstasy, joy, awe. Then the lights dim, and she’s profoundly empty again. “I walk offstage, I have to let this go, no matter how wonderful it’s been.” This is death — or, at least, how she imagines it. “I’m gonna die. I don’t mean that in a violent way. You can scream all you want. Start facing it now.”
If we are waiting for death, a Mitski concert on a beautiful, crisp fall night isn’t a bad way to pass the time. “She’s even more of a little weirdo than I thought,” my friend remarks. We’re smiling in our seats, surrounded by approximately 17,500 other little weirdos waiting to die.
As we made our way to our seats in the massive Hollywood Bowl earlier, I was reminded that where there is sorrow, where there are ballads of unrequited love, teenage girls will follow. The brilliant singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten opened the show with her dreamy songs about lost innocence and nostalgia. It was a bill that seemed to be cooked up in a forlorn teenage girl’s bedroom; the yearning was almost taut in the air. Van Etten introduced Mitski as an “honest, down-to-earth, giving person.” It’s the kind of tender endorsement that lands with softhearted, sentimental fans of these musicians.
Mitski materializes onstage, submerged in a red spotlight. There is a patterned tapestry behind her that, while bathed in red light, looks like dancing flames. She sings, gesturing to the sky. It briefly occurs to me that she looks like she’s singing in hell, the flames quivering around her. She sways between two black chairs on the stage. At one moment, she slow-dances with a spotlight. At the next, she pantomimes being a dog, curled onto her hands and knees.
Over the next hour, Mitski belts out lyrics in her signature hauntingly sad voice. She sometimes sings hunched over, her distress palpable as she croons about past lovers and lost memories. I am reminded of why I love Mitski and have returned to her music repeatedly for almost a decade. Beyond the slew of failed relationships she eulogizes in her melodies, Mitski seems to be most bewildered and disquieted by her own mind. She is both the scorned lover and swindling charmer — her biggest heartbreak is her reflection in the mirror. The affection she chases is her own.
To my chagrin, Mitski makes another heady proclamation to her audience. This time, she assures us that tonight is not special. “As much as we love our job, it’s just another night. It’s like day 250 of the year,” she clarifies with her band behind her. “I will sing, and I will dance around,” she says plainly. This declaration doesn’t read as a complaint or even boredom but instead as a radically vulnerable statement. She seems briefly self-conscious. “I’m gonna pop back into character,” she says, readying herself for the next song. As promised, she disappears into Mitski the pop star, unveiling her pain and loneliness under the moonlight with such devotion that perhaps the next time we’re hurt, we’ll think: It’s just another night.
