A Preamble: 2015, Bowery Ballroom.

It is around 9PM on a Saturday night at the Bowery Ballroom. The year is 2015. The opening band, Krill has just sauntered off the stage as a frantic young singer clad in jeans and a gray T-shirt with “ALCOHOL NICOTINE CAFFEINE” in big, block letters peeks from backstage. Soundchecking her instrument, she realizes her bright pink Dean bass guitar is not making sound. A massive fear for someone making a living off their music on a run of shows. She strums and strums and yet there is no sound emanating from the instrument. Running between stage management and guitar techs, the headlining band Speedy Ortiz’s bass player Darl Ferm offers her his Sharpie-laden Fender bass that she soundchecks with. 

After a few moments of uncertainty, the singer’s resolve softens and a guitar tech surprises her with her signature highlighter pink bass, in working condition once again. Her arm, complete again. Without a word, the band harmonizes a chord as Mitski’s siren song of a Phyrgian mode evokes an exotic sound, before diving into the raucous punk song “Townie” off her first record, the scrappy DIY project: “Bury Me at Makeout Creek.”

The Review: 2024, The Fillmore Miami Beach.

Nine years later, Mitski is playing a much bigger room. Once the announcement of her “The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We Tour” dropped, tickets for shows sold out near-instantly with the singer announcing a second night for most venues, including Miami’s newly-refurbished Jackie Gleason Theater with a revamped sound system that rings as clear as a bell. 

Tamino

Opening the show was singer Tamino, whose very unassuming stage presence let his music speak for himself. So much so that you would not know his name, unless you looked at the tour poster, since he never said his name once. Flanked by four string instruments, Tamino stands stoic with a nylon-string guitar strumming his track “The Longing.” His resonant tenor lower range soaring above a flamenco-esque guitar that evokes a space between Western and Eastern music. His fingers, flurrying through a modulation of chords that are so delightfully hypnotic, only underscored occasionally by a synthesizer texture. On his latest record “Sahar” the singer delves into a combination of textures that riffs on both his heritage of a Belgian and Egyptian upbringings. On the unreleased track “Bedford” he picks up an oud, a Middle Eastern lute made famous by players like Rahim AlHaj. Tamino’s use of such an eclectic instrument fits so effortlessly in his set, making use of microtonality with a voice that evokes Hozier or even Jeff Buckley.

Mitski

As a giant silk red cocoon appears lit onto the stage, an armada of seven musicians flanks the massive pillar. Two snare hits beget the lonesome wail of a pedal steel guitar and the show kicks off with “Everyone” off her last record “Laurel Hell.” She transforms the song into a more country-fied rendition as she casually traverses the stage. Clad in a white button down, brown business slacks and black ballet flats, Mitski appears for a few moments to hide behind the red curtain, with stage lighting making only her reflection tower over the crowd. The audience roars with absolute furor as the cocoon dramatically shimmies down, revealing the singer behind the curtain. 

While the previous tours feature a set piece integral to Mitski’s storytelling and choreographed performance, “Be the Cowboy” saw the singer performing atop a table, “Laurel Hell” with a door where the singer would emerge from and dance between, the “Land” tour utilizes two chairs as its main domestic interior motif. In “First Love/Late Spring” the chairs act as a window or on her crooner moments like “The Frost” she pantomimes strumming an invisible guitar while seated. 

One of the most significant aspects of a Mitski show within the last four album cycles has been the focus of contemporary dance in the singer’s live show. On this tour, choreographer Monica Mirabile has evoked a newer, at times playful sense of movement in the performance. Mirable states that “Having fun can simply mean being fully engaged in what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to mean partying, letting loose, or doing what outwardly looks ‘fun,’ but can instead just mean being focused and joyfully present in the moment.” Here, Mitski looks like she is having as much fun as ever, whether it’s enacting some Fosse-esque quiet movements on “Valentine, Texas” to the all-out line dancing on the Southern-tinged rendition of “I Don’t Smoke” where the singer beams from ear to ear as she joyously performs a one-woman routine. 

Setlist-wise the show featured essentially the entire record of “The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We” sans “When Memories Snow” which brought moments like “My Love Mine All Mine” and “The Deal” that have both been seeing viral moments brought to the stage in massive ways. However, with the record itself clocking in at around 30 minutes, the nearly two-hour stage show saw fairly even coverage from Mitski’s four other major records. While the newer tracks gave the audience a moment to ruminate in the immense stagecraft the singer is infusing into this show, the first “concert” moment came when the drum intro of “I Bet on Losing Dogs” jolted an uproarious electricity into the crowd. Even older tracks from “Bury Me at Makeout Creek” were given a new, deep-fried life as jangly country tunes from their original basement punk arrangements. With the singer having relocated to Nashville in the past two years when “The Land” was written, her geographic relevance to Music City has no doubt had an impact on Mitski’s writing style, with even the demos for “Laurel Hell” indicating that the record was initially less synthpop based. Fan favorites from “Lush” and “Retired From Sad, New Career in Business” were absent, but with a more markedly baroque-pop sound, their dense instrumentation may not have translated well to the yeehaw moment. While much of the audience looked quite young, around high school age, the embarrassing heckles of “MOTHER!” were shot down by the singer as “silly” and even keeping her most TikTok-notorious songs “Nobody” and “Washing Machine Heart” felt like the singer throwing a bone to the Chronically Online section of her fanbase.

With the giant cocoon and two chairs, the live show at times feels like a sung-through performance art piece or surrealistic musical theater. Especially as “My Love Mine All Mine” and a country version of “Last Words of a Shooting Star” seeing shards of reflective mirrors and paper cutout designs floating down from the sky as the singer croons the beautiful torch song. The juxtaposition of the two tracks back to back create a disconcerting moment from a tender love ballad to a death rattle from a dying person. However, what brilliantly works in tandem with this set design is the lighting that creates everything from massive color fields, to a single spotlight locked in a swing dance with Mitski, creating the visage of an invisible lover. With many cues timed with razor precision to the music, the lights are far less concert than a theatrical device here.  

On her “The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We” Tour, Mitski is as galvanized and uncompromising as ever on her vision. Choosing to play a run of seated theater venues plays to her strengths far more than trying to sell out an arena or play Coachella and it is paying off in her favor.  As an Asian-American woman, her foray into a genre where someone of her background is not well-represented, she defines “Americana” in her own, unique way. Ironically or intentionally, her biggest song about the subject of being an Eastern woman in Western music is absent in this show. Yet, infusing elements of performance art and baroque pop into the honky tonk, creates a question on what it means to be “American.” With singers like Kacey Musgraves going into Sad Girl Pop and Lana Del Rey covering Tammy Wynette on tour while threatening an ever-looming country record, Mitski weaves the aesthetic into a tapestry of her own creation that is far more thought-provoking. On her latest tour, Mitski is both exceptional in her presentation and the nuances of her voices are as powerful as ever, yet she does not offer simple answers in adopting the country genre into her sound. Having come from DIY roots, “The Land” Tour is as big and splashy maximalist Mitski experience as it could be, and nothing to me exemplifies the American dream quite like this.