Love As Conspiracy: "Once More to See You" by Mitski
Drumming Upstream 39
Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 440 songs to go!
This week, for the Season Two finale of Drumming Upstream, I learned how to play “Once More to See You” by Mitski, the reclusive singer-songwriter who, long before achieving world-conquering levels of TikTok virality, once took the American indie scene by storm. Through pure luck of circumstance I had the chance to watch that storm up close. What did I see from that precarious perch? How have my feelings about “Once More to See You” changed since? And what’s love got to do with it? Find out below!
Side A
“Once More to See You”
By Mitski
Puberty 2
Released on June 17th, 2016
Liked on June 19th, 2016
I do not know Mitski, but I know people that did. I know people that attended SUNY Purchase with her. I know people that toured with her, and people that played in her backing band. I’m telling you this to give you a critical disclaimer, because my musical relationships are inextricable from my social relationships, and, if I’m being honest, to cash in on my DIY-cred investments. Look, I am a 33 year old who has played music and hung out with musicians from Brooklyn, New York since the mid-2000s. I don’t have all that much success to show for it, but I have had early proximity to the start of a handful of careers far more auspicious than my own. Sometimes those success stories have taken me completely by surprise. Other times they’ve felt pre-ordained. Mitski falls firmly into the latter camp.
In 2014 on the recommendation of Jack Greenleaf, my boss in Sharpless at the time, my current bandmate in Bellows and the producer of the upcoming Lamniformes album The Lonely Atom, my roommate Grace Cain and I traveled north from our apartment in Pilsen to see Mitski perform along with LVL Up at the Beat Kitchen (capacity: 300) in Roscoe Village. Jack had raved to us about the chamber pop of Mitski’s first two self-released albums, Lush (2012) and Retired From Sad, New Career in Business (2013). Mitski recorded those two albums while studying studio composition at Purchase, where she made full use of the rolodex of session musicians the student pool provided. That night at the Beat Kitchen Mitski did something different. Playing bass instead of piano and backed up by two of the LVL Up boys, Mitski cranked the volume and let loose. There were at most 15 other people in the room with us when Mitski took the stage, and I’d wager that each and everyone of them has bragged about this fact in the decade since. I have seen a number of great singers and heard a lot of talented songwriters. Most of them have turned out to be, in Mitski’s parlance, losing dogs. At that show in 2014 Mitski had a great voice, a smoky alto with the tenderness of candle light and the force of a forest fire, and great songs. The studio version of “Townie” for example, as great as it is, has never lived up to the version Mitski played that night where she wailed the bridge melody in lieu of a synth solo. She also had, as loathe as I am to admit as a materialist when it comes to matters of music theory, the ineffable magnetism of star power. I have never been more sure that I was watching someone who was about to be extremely famous.
Grace and I exchanged pleasantries with Mitski after the set, explained our mutual connection to Jack Greenleaf and left with a copy of the then unreleased Bury Me At Makeout Creek on vinyl, which we immediately ripped out of the plastic and played at high volume when we got home. Beyond this short conversation I’ve never spoken to Mitski again, though she does still follow me on Instagram and did like two of my posts (a moody picture of a chapel where I was playing drums for a musical theater production, and a picture of my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabrial Garcia Marquez, which both feel pretty appropriate) in 2016. If this disqualifies me from writing about Mitski’s music with any critical authority, so be it. But personally I think it would be a stretch to say that I knew Mitski in any real sense. From what I’ve heard anecdotally and from what Mitski’s said herself in interviews, I wouldn’t really know her even if we had spoken to each other again.
Mitski is a deeply private person. As her star has risen over the last ten years she’s become increasingly guarded, only communicating on social media through the intermediary of her management. She’s suggested that this privacy stems from her rootless upbringing as part of the U.S. Foreign Policy diaspora. Growing up in transit, moving from Japan, China, Turkey and more before settling in the States in high school, Mitski learned to keep her distance. “If I attached,” Mitski told the New York Times in 2016 “it means I’d have to detach”. Another factor in Mitski’s reticence with the spotlight is the outsized reactions her music has inspired in her fans. The downside of having a star’s magnetism is that people will project all sorts of nonsense onto you. Depending on who you ask she is either a therapist, a CIA asset, or any number of things in between.
Even as far back as 2016 people were determined to have the wrong idea about Mitski. When Mitski released “Your Best American Girl” as the first single for her fourth album, Puberty 2 (2016), she assured both her inevitable stardom and a thousand misreadings. Critics and fans alike took the song, a lament for a romance doomed by cultural differences set to lighter-waving arena rock, as a sign that Mitski was a musical activist striking back at the hegemony of boring white dudes in indie rock. Over and over critics took the bait of a half-Japanese girl singing over massive guitars to compare Mitski endlessly to Weezer. Spin devoted a solid half of their review of Puberty 2 to contrast Mitski with the entirety of the mid-2010s emo scene. Time, and Mitski’s continued ascendance, has rendered this framing woefully inadequate, but even in the moment it was clear that the mantle of feminist superhero rockstar never quite fit on Mitski’s brow. Her songs are too thorny, their sentiment too messy and ultimately too human for that kind of idol worship.
Despite all the attempts to keep her in the box of indie rock, time has revealed the truth. Mitski was always a singer-songwriter in rocker’s clothing. As far back as Lush Mitski used the rock band as one format among many. Her embrace of lo-fi recording quality and loud guitars in the mid-2010s was a matter of practicality, a way to keep costs low in the studio and on the road. Another consequence of never staying in one place is learning how to be ruthlessly self-sufficient. Beneath the distortion, behind the howling screams into guitar pickups, Mitski has been a singer of torch songs and character studies who happened to emerge onto a scene where diaristic confession ruled the day. What Mitski offered her audience was something richer and more nuanced than simple blood-letting. For every supposed revelation, her music offers as many “red herrings”. These misdirections don’t just keep Mitski a safe distance from her rabid fans, they also give her fans the space to find themselves in her work. How else could Mitski have transitioned so seamlessly from speaking for a millennial generation just coming to grips with the on-rush of adulthood to speaking to legions of teens a decade later? Only by keeping herself a secret.
It is Mitski’s tendency toward privacy and secrecy that make her such a good writer on the theme of love. For my money she has yet to write a better love song than “Once More to See You”, the third track on Puberty 2. While the press gravitated toward “Your Best American Girl” at the time and, if Spotify’s counting stats are anything to go by, the teens have since embraced “I Bet On Losing Dogs”, I snuck away with “Once More to See You” after only one session with Puberty 2. I was admittedly an easy mark for any song that could conceivably be at home at the Twin Peaks Roadhouse1, especially in 2016, and Mitski and producer Patrick Hyland’s dirge-tempo take on the ubiquitous “Be My Baby” beat (more on that on Side B) certainly qualifies.
A sultry take on the girl-group sound might be the setting, but Mitski’s melody and lyrics are, as always, the star. Keeping arrangements simple may have been a matter of pragmatism on Mitski & Hyland’s part, but it also directs the listener’s attention to her voice and establishes an illusion of intimacy. This is one of Mitski’s greatest strengths as an artist. She has mastered the art of giving you just enough to make you think she’s given you everything. In the same Times interview that I quoted earlier, Mitski describes “learning to be open in certain aspects of my life to almost create a red herring so that other stuff can remain private.”2 By album four she’d honed the steps of this trick down to the most efficient essentials. “Once More to See You” only has two verses worth of lyrics for a total of 95 words (the last verse is a repeat of the second). In just three of those words, “alone with me”, Mitski squeezes out a paragraph’s worth of subtext. The image of a sunset on a lover’s skin reflected in a rearview mirror suggests the history of the day preceding it. Without giving us anything concrete Mitski has brought us close enough to see the most intimate of details.
One more quote from that New York Times interview. When talking about her songwriting process Mitski said “It’s like I’m sending out messages in bottles, but very picky and stubborn and selfish in that I only want the right person to receive it”. Though she’s referring to her approach as a whole, this quote is a perfect description of the tension between “Once More to See You”’s first and second verse. Every love story is at its heart a conspiracy. It’s hard not to feel in the early days like the two of you are getting away with something, pulling off a heist on everyone who doesn’t yet know. And yet the full intensity of the feeling begs to be expressed as far and wide as possible. So in the first verse Mitski urges the recipient of her message in a bottle to “keep it secret” only so she doesn’t “scream your name from the roof of every city in my heart” in the second.
I wrote much of this entry while traveling by plane from Chicago to New York City. I’ve made this trip a handful of times this year to visit *~my girlfriend~* and she’s done the same to visit me in New York. I’ve mentioned *~my girlfriend~* a few times in this newsletter but I’ve always been careful to not say that much about her. Usually because it isn’t relevant to the subject at hand, but also because withholding the details keeps those details precious to me. I know that she reads these newsletters and I know that when she does she’ll be privy to parts of me and my life that no other reader has access to. That shared secret history, mundane as it is, lies dormant under the surface of every thing I write that she reads. It gives me an indescribable comfort in our time apart to know that on the other end of this digital ocean she is out there to receive each bottle corked and untainted by the eyes of the rest of the web.
You see how the trick works? With only a few scant snatches of images and surgically positioned similes, Mitski sent me down a stream of consciousness that poured into the gaps of “Once More to See You”. Mitski’s cross-generational appeal and the powerful projections she draws out of her audience both come back to this. Both are a testament to her economy as a writer and ability as a singer. And as we’ll discuss on Side B it’s no surprise that she show the same restraint in her arranging and production.
Side B
“Once More to See You”
Performed by Patrick Hyland
94 BPM (approx)
Time Signature: 4/4
One consequence of following Mitski’s work for this long is that I am more than slightly paranoid about speaking out of turn about her liner notes. I remember when Mitski came after Song Exploder for how they presented Hyland’s hand in her music on their episode about “Your Best American Girl”. I’d pull up the tweets, but that version of Mitski’s Twitter account is long gone. I have found no evidence that anyone still cares about this ancient tiff, but because I was on DIY Twitter in the mid 2010s I am hardwired to tread lightly on uncertain ground. You know, I see jokes, memes, and other internet japes all the time about the anti-social tendencies of metal and hardcore fans. In my experience most of my metal and hardcore friends are pretty chill, maybe a little dorky, maybe a little weathered but still hardy. The DIY internet on the other hand took some people I know and left them fucked up. What I’m saying is that Mitski was right to delete her Twitter and that if she in fact played the drums on “Once More to See You” I’m sorry, and great job. However, it would be hard for any serious listener to dispute that Mitski and Hyland’s chemistry has played a substantial role in her discography. Take my attribution as an acknowledgement of that chemistry and let’s move on.
Besides, the beat to “Once More to See You” is too ingrained in the DNA of pop music to belong to any one drummer. In his book Every Song Ever, Ben Ratliff attributes it to session drummer Hal Blaine before claiming “it was there before you got here and will be there when you leave”. Ratliff argues that the groove is an extension of an even older rhythm: the tresillo, a three beat rhythm crucial to Latin music and consequently most pop music the world over. This particular pattern, which goes “kick/kick-kick/snare”, immediately recalls the girl groups of the 1950s and 60s and the old fashioned notions of romance that we associate with them. Musicians have exploited that nostalgic notion since at least The Jesus And Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey”. By 2010, Ratliff couldn’t make it through a CMJ playlist without being bombarded by bum-bumbum-BAH.
Here, Mitski uses the universal to evoke the specific, taking a classic beat and slowing it down as if to pull you closer on the dance floor. Adding to the old school charm is the tambourine that Mitski & Hyland layer over the snare. Outside of the occasional stretch where the tambourine plays the traditional two-and-four backbeat, Mitski & Hyland never build on the basic framework of this groove. Instead they create dynamics by withholding in the third verse. First they cut away most of the bass drum hits, then they fill those notes back in but remove the snare. These changes don’t quite happen where you expect them. Instead of switching after four repetitions, Hyland drops the snare after three measures. This is a brilliant move. It gives the audience both a surprise and the satisfaction of an expectation confirmed. None of these details feel overworked either. According to an interview with NPR, Mistki & Hyland only spent two weeks recording Puberty 2. At that pace I doubt they spent much time fussing over alternative versions of the drum groove for this song. They picked an unimpeachable classic and rode it into the sunset, only making the most subtle changes they could afford to maintain the mood.
The rest of the arrangement matches this level of restrain. Beyond the bass and drums that give “Once More to See You” its backbone, Mitski and Hyland barely add to the song. Mitski’s guitar is stashed away in the far left channel and barely announces itself over her voice and bass. Other than the hair-raising harmony that enters in the second verse on the iconic “city of my heart” lyric, the only other instrument is a synth that trembles with the anticipation of a first kiss. Even the instruments on “Once More to See You” match the tension between secrecy and naked vulnerability that Mitski achieves in her lyrics. The bass and drums pound with the confidence of desire while the synth and guitar waver with the anxiety of longing.
Normally I’d leave a detail like the tambourine part to the backing track, but as luck would have it one of my roommates at my practice space had a tambourine set up on the house kit when I was learning how to play “Once More to See You”. I took the opportunity to learn how to play both parts simultaneously, which is how I would assume the drummer for Mitski’s live band would play the song live today in venues with a cap far larger than 300.
I am not Dave Grohl, but I’ve got a confession to make. Every time I finish recording and filming a drum cover I upload it straight to my YouTube channel even if I’m month’s away from writing about it. In fact, if you go to my YouTube channel right now you’ll find nine or so drum covers that I haven’t written about yet. I suppose this is proof that I’m ultimately more of a drummer than a writer. It is much easier for me to learn multiple songs on the instrument at once than it is for me to write 3,000 words about them. As it so happens, “Once More to See You” has been viewed and liked more often on YouTube than any other song in my backlog. That means some combination of the following: Mitski is very popular on the internet, and I did a good job playing this song on drums. Stacey King and Michael Jordon combined to score 70 points, things of that nature. However it happened, this video’s popularity played no small part in my choice to move “Once More to See You” way up the queue to end this season. But my love for the song, for how I’ve heard it in this year that I’ve spent privately, deeply in love with someone, has been far more important to its place in your inbox today. To find out exactly how much I love “Once More to See You” scroll below to the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
In his review for Spin, Dan Weiss says that Puberty 2 “as a landmark of histrionic DIY music… deserves to be part of something bigger than itself.” This prediction and demand of destiny came true, except the bigger thing that “Once More to See You” belongs to isn’t the parochial concerns of the emo scene in 2016, but the volcanic eruption of Mitski’s ensuing success. I won’t lie to you, watching this song’s author achieve the highest ceiling of their potential makes “Once More to You See” all the more dear to me. But no matter how popular Mitski’s records get I still feel like this song is my little secret. It scores memories shared only privately. It is also a masterpiece of songwriting. Mitski’s climb up the scale on the second half of the verse melody never fails to raise the hair on the back of my neck and the gentle come down for the title line has never left the corners of my memory.
Because I associate Mitski’s nod to the romance of 60s pop with Angelo Badalamenti’s similarly nostalgic score to Twin Peaks I can’t help but rank “Once More to See You” against “Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me”. In this head to head match up Mitski falls just short of the South Brooklyn Maestro, settling at an impressive No. 12 on the Leaderboard.
The Current Top Ten
Thank you for reading. This is the last entry of Drumming Upstream of 2023. This series will return in January. Until then, I miss you and I’ll see you in 2024 *~*~.
It is interesting to me and maybe a few other readers out there that Tim Rogers of Action Button, an army brat who also spent his childhood bouncing from state to state, achieves something similar in the autobiographical sections of his video reviews by instead giving his viewers so much that they doesn’t realize how much he’s still holding back. If anyone can confirm that army brat and power forward for the Utah Jazz John Collins has similar habits you’d have my invite list for The Most Interesting Dinner Party of the Year.