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 much different. Playing bass instead of piano and backed up 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.
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