Artist: Mitski
Song: I’ll Change For You
Album: Nothing’s About to Happen to Me (2026, forthcoming)

Mitski is back for another album roll-out, and she released the second single for her upcoming album yesterday. I’ll Change For You marks a bit of a departure from her previous work, with a distinct, Laufey-tinged bossa nova jazz vibe. She puts her own spin on it, of course, bringing her trademark melancholy as she declares that she will change for her former lover, contort herself however she must in order to be whatever he needs.

One thing I’d like to highlight here is Mitski’s continued invocation of childhood. Frequently in her music she compares herself to a child, lonely and afraid. In this song, the second and final verse goes:

Bars, such magic places
You can be with other people
Without having anyone at all, but now
They say they’re closing
So I’m loitering outside
Watching all the cars passing by
Like a kid waiting for my ride

In her 2014 song First Love / Late Spring, the second and final verse reads:

And I was so young when I behaved twenty-five
Yet now, I find I’ve grown into a tall child
And I don’t wanna go home yet
Let me walk to the top of the big night sky

While 2016’s Your Best American Girl, once named Pitchfork’s seventh best song of the last decade, highlights her inability to properly fulfill the eponymous role of Best American Girl:

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

Music criticism is certainly not an area of expertise for me. When listening to music, I tend to seek out music that brings in pure emotion, something that brings my soul in connection with another. I do think that the image of a child is a powerful one, especially when invoked as a moment of regression. We all feel like children in moments. Invoking that vulnerability has certainly been a successful way for Mitski’s music to connect with me in the past, and I doubt I’m the only one.