Mitski - Your Best American Girl

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. [instrumental music] In 2016, Mitski did an episode of Song Exploder about her song, Your Best American Girl. She had just released her second album, Puberty 2. Later, Pitchfork named Your Best American Girl one of the top 10 best songs of the past decade, and Billboard named it as one of the songs that defined the decade. This year is the 10th anniversary of the album. There's a new deluxe version that's already out digitally, and a limited edition vinyl is coming in October. So I thought this would be a good time to revisit Mitski's episode, where she and her collaborator, Patrick Hyland, break down how Your Best American Girl was made.

[singing] Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me. But I do, I think I do. And you're an all-American boy. I guess I couldn't help trying to be your best American girl. [instrumental music] My name's Mitski. My full name is Mitski Miyawaki. I never grew up with musical instruments or with equipment to record. The way I learned to write was just writing things down on paper and hearing it in my head and kind of hoping for the best. And I don't, I don't work in a band, so I'm alone in my own head. So the lyrics and the vocal melody are king in my songs. They always come first. [singing] If I could, I'd be your little spoon and kiss your fingers forevermore. But big spoon, you have so much to do and I have nothing ahead of me. The chorus came first. I was on a bed, and I wrote down the words, "Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me, but I do, I think I do. And you're an all-American boy, I guess I couldn't help trying to be your best American girl." [singing] Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me, but I do, I think I do. And you're an all-American boy, I guess I couldn't help trying to be your best American girl. I was in love with somebody, but I just felt like our backgrounds or the places we come from or how we were raised were just so completely different, and it felt like something that couldn't be overcome by love. I grew up very nomadically. I grew up moving around a, a whole lot, and not just in the US, but abroad, and my mother is Japanese and my father's American, and so I, I never grew up with a sense of community. My sense of family is very different. I think I grew up more with a sense of everything will be lost at some point, like you have to prepare yourself to let go at all times. Because I just kept moving so much, and I kept... You know, you can only say goodbye so many times before you start to, like, automatically prepare yourself for that. So my upbringing was just very, very different from the average American's. [singing] You're the sun. You've never seen the night, but you hear its song from the morning birds. Well, I'm not the moon. I'm not even a star. But awake at night, I'll be singing to the birds. I wanted to be accepted by an environment or a family situation where, you know, people lived in the same place all their lives and knew the same people and know where they're from and