Last Words of a Shooting Star

"Last Words of a Shooting Star" closes Bury Me At Makeout Creek by going almost entirely quiet — a single clean guitar, a distant organ swell, a room tone you can hear. After forty minutes of feedback and blown-out drums, the silence is the loudest gesture on the record. Mitski sings it near-conversationally, low in her range, with the flatness of someone narrating rather than emoting; the melody barely moves. What she's narrating is a plane about to go down, and the mind's response to that, which turns out to be embarrassment: she left the dishes, she doesn't want anyone to find her apartment messy, she wants to be remembered as a woman who had her life together. The final image — I am relieved that I left my room tidy — is one of the cruelest small observations in her catalog, because it locates the fear of death not in oblivion but in being witnessed unprepared. Written by a first-generation immigrant who moved thirteen times growing up, it also reads as being about never having had a room that was yours to leave tidy. Listen last, in order, alone, with nothing scheduled after.