Last Words of a Shooting Star

This is the most formally unusual track in her catalog from this period — where her other songs tend toward stripped-back guitar arrangements, this one is built on piano and a spacious, orchestral-leaning production, more cinematic in its reach. The tempo is deliberate and measured, each phrase landing with the weight of considered thought. Mitski's voice here is at its most composed, almost detached, the delivery of someone narrating from a remove that could be either achieved clarity or a kind of dissociation. The song imagines a final reckoning from inside a falling plane — using that extreme circumstance as a frame to examine the ordinary smallness of an ordinary life, the gap between the self we present outward and the interior we keep to ourselves. There's no melodrama in the performance, which is what allows the premise to resonate rather than collapse into self-importance. This is about the loneliness of interiority — the impossibility of fully transmitting a self to another person even over a lifetime of trying. It belongs to the Bury Me at Makeout Creek era when her songwriting was achieving a precision that felt genuinely unprecedented in the indie landscape. You'd reach for this on a long flight, or late at night in one of those philosophical hours when mortality and insignificance feel proximate and, somehow, bearable to contemplate.