Mitski’s First Manila Show Was My First Concert—Here’s What Happened to Me

At Mitski’s first concert in Manila, Filipino fans find a voice in the acclaimed singer-songwriter’s stories of loneliness, longing, and looking for a place to land. 

From her indie rock breakthrough to the orchestral folk of her recent albums, there are layers to Mitski Miyawaki’s sound, and when I arrived at the SM Mall of Asia Arena for her first Manila show, I saw fans take those layers literally: plaid and lace tops above tulle and satin skirts, ruffled blouses spilling from corsets and sweater vests, and an abundance of feline motifs, a reference to the indie singer-songwriter’s latest release, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. 

When the 11-track album came out in February, along with the announcement of Mitski’s world tour that placed Manila as the inaugural Asia stop, I instantly saw the opportunity for my first concert-going experience. Previous attempts had failed; I was choosy, I didn’t want to spend, or something got in the way (see: the pandemic). But now, the decision felt clear, and given my relationship with Mitski’s music, I didn’t mind going alone. Part of me wanted it that way.

Isolation is a common theme in the artist’s work and one that her largely Gen Z listeners respond to. In a video on YouTube, fans at the London show in May shared their “ideal Mitski listening environments”: a messy kitchen, wailing her songs while washing the dishes; through headphones on a darkened bus ride home; in an empty park on a summer evening; and lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, the clock blinking 3 A.M. as the rain pours outside. 

Yet, for a reason I hadn’t placed, I couldn’t envision myself in a Mitski crowd. Aside from encountering stray references to her among local art convention goers, I couldn’t say what her audience looked like. I knew we’d be twenty-somethings or millennials, and that a statistical majority of us were women and queer people who saw in her work our interior lives narrated back to us. But mostly, I imagined a nebulous group of introverts without any shared style.

On the afternoon of July 14, I learned that I couldn’t have been more wrong. Perhaps it has to do with the artist’s commercial success in 2023, when the chorus of her single “My Love Mine All Mine” became a trending audio on TikTok, scoring over 2.6 million videos; or with the limited run of her concert film Mitski: The Land in Philippine cinemas last October; or the building hype toward her upcoming performance among the all-women lineup at Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields Festival in August. But I’d never seen more Mitski fans make themselves known.

On the sidewalks and stairs leading up to the arena, I saw grunge and gothic elements mesh with knitwear and “cottagecore” dresses, an unspoken code that concealed the body and revealed the wearer through a medley of textures and patterns. It was a duality that Mitski echoed onstage, her plaid sleeves and red stockings peeking out from beneath a monochrome two-piece that reminded me of a pared-down baro’t saya (traditional blouse and skirt).

When the concert promptly began, my brain lagged as she launched into “In a Lake” and “Cats,” the first and third tracks from Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. The atmosphere summoned by her live touring band felt large and grandiose, all while Mitski roamed between mundane set pieces on opposite ends of the stage, sitting at a desk or crumpling on a couch.

If the tour for her previous release The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We saw Mitski double down on theatricality, introducing lush orchestration, sometimes a choir, and deliberate, often jarring choreography inspired by the Japanese avant-garde dance Butoh, then the current tour for her eighth studio album draws that energy inward, closer to the shadowy realm of the home. Somewhere a stone’s throw away from Land’s Americana, Mitski invites us to the Tansy House, where she casts herself as a paranoid woman who finds reprieve in her archaic abode. 

As the album grew on me in the weeks leading up to the concert, I came to appreciate its fictional world; how the Tansy’s cluttered aesthetic and roots in 20th century gothic domestic horror somehow mirrored the pervasive overwhelm that’s distinct to today’s digital native youth. In tears during “Instead of Here,” my favorite song from the new album, I wondered how Mitski could feel so misunderstood and still connect with so many people. How do you construct a tour around a persona that, as she intones in that sixth track, “nobody can reach”?

Unfortunately, untangling the answer meant looking back. There are artists I associate with a specific time in my life, and others who have become staples in my heavy rotation. Then, there are artists who cut across the mental chapters I section my life into, whose careers and personal journeys punctuate my own in strange, offhand ways. Mitski falls into the latter, a realization that only hit me this year, a decade after I first stumbled onto her discography.

Back in high school, the song that introduced me to Mitski was not sung by the artist herself but by Olivia Olson, the voice actress who plays Marceline in the animated fantasy series Adventure Time. Marceline, a half-demon vampire whose emotions could trigger a monster transformation or an angsty musical performance, was my favorite character. I was drawn to her anger and her sadness, her ability to pen vulnerable lyrics that could sidestep her tough, blunt exterior. One of her most memorable scenes is in Season 8, where she stands in front of a crowd and begins to strum a steady bassline, the opening of Mitski’s “Francis Forever.”

I soon had the original song on repeat and was searching for anything I could find of the Japanese-American musician on YouTube. I remember best: Mitski bare-faced and screaming into her electric guitar on NPR’s Tiny Desk, a heart-rending plea to her mother in the song “Class of 2013”; Mitski in a white button-down shirt floating in a lake, filmed from underwater at the end of “A Burning Hill”; and the chorus of “Your Best American Girl,” where the music video cuts between a kissing couple and Mitski earnestly making out with her own palm.

I thought my attachment to her would be locked to that era, when microblogging sites like Twitter and Tumblr still felt like spaces of expression and community, and when albums like the widely acclaimed Puberty 2 aligned with my own changing and awkward, adolescent body. But in 2022, when the credits rolled on the absurdist film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, I recognized her voice in the duet with David Byrne. Like I’d gone back in time, I thought.

Somewhere between catching up with her then-new synth-pop releases, Be the Cowboy and Laurel Hell, I found her cover of Lily Chou-Chou’s “Glide” and I was hooked. The experience left me slightly deflated. Worse than feeling like I was 16 again, it dawned on me that I hadn’t aged out of the experience; that the abjection and longing Mitski gives voice to had surpassed my teenage years, and that I was carrying it into adulthood.

Alone, it was a crushing conclusion. But as I saw on the night of the concert, the long-running current of loneliness in Mitski’s oeuvre paradoxically keeps bringing listeners together.

Inside the arena, there were a lot of moving moments: the first rock song with anti-capitalist anthem “Working for the Knife,” the mesmerizing performance of 2013 deep-cut “I Want You,” the surprise addition of hit single “Nobody” to the setlist, and the sea of lights that emerged from the crowd during the chorus of “Two Slow Dancers,” a fan-favorite ballad. Still, the number I’ll really remember is when Mitski sang “Francis Forever,” and it was one out of a handful of songs that the entire audience shot out of their seats for and sang back in unison.

There were, of course, a number of crowd-pleasers that were absent from the setlist; “First Love/Late Spring” was a song that fans briefly clamored for, while I silently hoped Mitski would randomly decide that “Heat Lightning” and “I’m Your Man” made sense to perform, too.

 

It was after the encore, a haunting rendition of “Pearl Diver” from the artist’s self-released debut album Lush in 2012 (her junior-year project at SUNY Purchase College’s Conservatory of Music), that I realized whatever I wanted out of the show was in much better hands than my own. This is probably what concerts are for; to remember that your favorite artists aren’t jukeboxes, and that at the end of the day, the reason why we show up is to listen.

With the opening track of her newest album and the closing track of her oldest album as bookends, I came away thinking about the 14 years in between, and how Mitski’s evolving sound carries a nonlinear sense of growth; one that encourages looking around, lingering, and letting your most walled-up self tell you why those walls were built in the first place. 

Maybe you won’t break them down, Mitski seems to say, but there’s something worthy in the ways we live around them. Like loosened cats, finding spaces to inhabit in the layers.

By AYLLI CORTEZ. Photographs by GABRIEL VILLAREAL. Digital Associate Editor: Chelsea Sarabia. Multimedia Artist: Bea Lu.