Mitski shuffles around the stage, interpreting each song with a unique dance movement. Sometimes she’s jittering like a puppet on a string; sometimes she’s stepping on all fours like a dog; sometimes she’s strutting with exaggerated jerks, a la David Byrne. A seven-piece band orchestrates the theatrical show, and I’m witnessing this all with thousands of other people in Jacobs Pavilion. Together, we feel one of the year's last summer breezes wash over us in the cool night.
A flashback: In 2017, I was stuffed into a corner of the Grog Shop. It was a year after her fourth album Puberty 2, this sold-out appearance in Cleveland Heights for just a few hundred people. At the time, I was 23. I was living in my first apartment after college. I was posting much of my life on social media — and that night, I posted a grainy photo of Mitski in front of the venue’s red curtains —
— and whenever I see it, I think of softness, and of heartbreak, and of how I heard her sing some of the most profound music I’d yet experienced live, in this hushed audience (a rarity in Cleveland).
We listened, attentively. We swayed.
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On that night seven years ago, I fell for her songs. And I fell for the ones that arrived a year later, on Be the Cowboy (an all-time favorite album) — and four years after that, too, on Laurel Hell. Poetry and nostalgia and genre-warping instrumentals made up the atmospheres of devastating indie anthems, slow-build gritty rockers, synth-driven dance numbers, twangy Americana romps — Mitski’s discography really covers it all.
And then, she offered more, on 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, an album with one of the finest love songs of the decade with “My Love Mine All Mine,” a now-TikTok-famous ballad.
She sings that one on Tuesday night in Cleveland at Jacobs Pavilion, as garlands of shiny brass metal shapes descend around her, glimmering in front of the city skyline. She sings other highlights, too: “Nobody” (can anyone BUT Mitski sing the word “nobody” 30+ times and make it sound that freaking catchy?!), and “Working for the Knife” (an scathing anti-capitalist ode), and “First Love/Late Spring” (a flashback: this is the first song I ever heard by Mitski).
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And then a flash-forward: On Tuesday Mitski moves confidently around the Jacobs Pavilion stage, freely dancing as if she’s alone in a room. Along with her artsy moves, her music is bigger now, with critical acclaim rolling in with each new album, along with billions of plays on streaming sites. Her show is bigger, too — detailed color-changing lights, carefully choreographed spaces, a band in tune with her every twitch on stage.
Despite all the change, all the passed time, the connection between Mitski and her audience feels just how it did seven years ago at the Grog Shop. The crowd is captured in Mitski’s dreamy tunes again.
We listen, attentively. We sway.
Setlist:
See more photos from the concert below:
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