a small CW: depression, self-destructive behaviour, dissociation.
[day 13 of a summer of substack - just in time! it’s under-edited, so forgive me.]
— for Lizzie
hear it call to me, constantly
The first time I listened to Puberty 2 is one I can’t quite recall. It was probably in 2019 (five years ago. How was that five years ago?) or thereabouts. It was when I was still on tiktok, and it was when I Bet On Losing Dogs was trending. Naturally, I then listened to Be The Cowboy, because that’s the most logical step, no? After this, and a mild obsession with Geyser and A Pearl, I trawled through Mitski’s back catalogue and found Puberty 2. But again, I can’t quite recall. I think that’s probably for the best. All I know is that I listened to it before 2021, before I could relate to many of the themes Mitski brings up and uses as motifs through her lyricism and music.
There are two converging themes we can try to follow through Puberty 2, and it would be useless to separate them, so instead let me talk about how they intersect and overlap. These are the themes of love and depression. Both broad terms, I know. Let me try and define them.
What is love? Baby don’t hurt me. Let’s say for now that love in this album is attraction, physical and emotional intimacy, and the willingness to form a close relationship with a person.
And what is depression? Well. Maybe I’ll let the music do the talking.
Mitski is very good at playing these themes off of each other, and it’s something she’s only continued to do since the release of this album in 2016. It’s another album I’ve had on repeat recently, but it more frequently pops up as select songs on one of my 80-ish (that’s not an exaggeration) playlists. At the request of my friend I sat down and listened to it fully, let it wash over me. And I had some thoughts. God forbid.
if you’re going take the train
In the timeline of Puberty 2, Happy — at least to me — is a prologue. I am reminded of studying Feminine Gospels by Carol Ann Duffy, and how her piece The Long Queen served both as an introduction to the book and a starting point for its themes. It says to you, here’s what you’re in for.
Within Happy is a desire for connection, no matter how short or successful. Though it’s about leaving, the narrator still wants to feel their departing lover when they’re not there. She sings, “if you’re going, take the train, so I can hear it rumble”, and in the closing moments we hear it roll its way down the tracks. It’s the freight train in Buffalo, Replaced, too — a symbol of departure. Before the lover leaves, the relationship is of central focus. It’s caring even: “I poured him tea”, but there’s an almost unspoken loss present in “he told me it’ll all be okay”. When the narrator begs him to stay, they have sex. The two are apparently both emotionally and physically intimate, and we gain a picture of their relationship. However, the second verse is the aftermath, in which there seems to be a complete lack of care. He, Happy himself, doesn’t announce his exit and leaves the door open, with all “the cookie wrappers and the empty cups of tea” littered around our narrator’s house. His exit has brought destruction, then, or a veil of some kind has fallen. What was once a symbol of care has become one of loss. The narrator is resigned: “again, I have to clean” she mumbles to herself. There is no one left around to hear her.
Characterising a loss of happiness as the loneliness felt after a relationship breaks down is an illustration of how Happy deftly weaves the theme of love with depression and loss. It’s a push-pull that is first seen in this central relationship, and only continues as we get further into the album.
you’re the one, you’re all I ever wanted
The love in Puberty 2 is not the nice kind, and maybe not the loving kind at all. Instead, love is presented at first as a kind of addictive behaviour — one that can fully take you over, a feeling that you sacrifice all else for. No matter how (un)healthy that may be, and no matter whether it’s actually present.
Dan the Dancer encompasses the feeling that the person you love is a safe place. But what are the consequences when they are the only person you feel safe with? Our main character is apparently pursued constantly by anxiety, “hanging on to a cliff”. But whilst he might feel free to express himself to “you and you alone”, he makes sacrifices to do so. He takes his hand off of the cliff, putting his own life on the line for love. And you know what they say about cliffhangers…
Once More To See You, in an opposing vein, concerns the regret which can arise with love. The feeling of leaving someone behind, knowing that you should have spent more time with them. Watching them stand on the platform as your train pulls away, and the rumble of it leaving not being enough to console you. This thread is pulled further in Your Best American Girl, a song, as Mitski describes it, about doomed love.
It’s just a feeling of loving someone so much, and yet being from completely different backgrounds and not being able to do anything about it. You watch movies where the couple loves each other so much but can’t be together because of their fate or whatever, and when I was younger I thought that was so stupid. I just thought, “They love each other, why can’t they be together? This is ridiculous.” But then as I got older, it’s like, “Oh, I see.” (NPR)
A Loving Feeling is the anticipation of a love you know isn’t going to return, bridging the gap between the love described in its title, and the hopelessness of its lyrics. “I’m staying up late just in case you come up and ask to leave with me” is a familiar feeling, and it’s the worst feeling in the world. At the risk of getting too personal (which I’m sure I will towards the end of this piece), I will zoom out slightly. When there’s a feeling like this, this restlessness, you can’t focus. It’s the anticipation of it all, the checking your phone every two minutes to see if they’ve texted you. Putting your phone on vibrate and jumping at every notification. It’s not good for you, but what can you do?
It doesn’t escape my notice that in all of these songs supposedly about love, there are mentions of being alone. “When no-one was home”; “the loving feeling makes you all alone”; the separation of the “Sun” and the narrator who is “awake at night”; even the title of Once More To See You. It is a love felt only in its absence. A yearning, more accurately, which is solely partnered by dejection.
tell me no, tell me no
The feeling of being alone naturally opens itself up to blame. We feel like it’s our fault for being left alone, we must have done something to warrant it, right? It’s a flaw of the human brain as far as I can see one: we feel the need to apply logic to everything. I mean, I can’t speak. It’s what I’m doing by writing this piece. And this self-blame can very quickly be fanned into self-destruction.
I talk about this self-destruction in vague terms, as does Mitski. If I were to search for a definition I would come back empty-handed, but I share Mitski’s view that it seems to be any behaviour which is actively detrimental to ourselves, but done still for the perceived approval of others. After all, love is only the other side of the coin.
I Bet On Losing Dogs illustrates this perfectly. A feeling that your actions are futile, but you can’t quite seem to escape them. You look for approval (“will you let me?”) and you look for love (“you’re my baby, say it to me”). You look for a connection which has only been diminished. The physical intimacy in Happy is mirrored here, but it’s just another illusion. The narrator likens herself to the titular losing dogs, her partner “watch[ing her] die”, just as she’d watch them. She feels as though she herself is too hopeless to be invested in, and that people involve themselves with her out of pity. The narrator seems to find a kind of solace, though, in this kinship with the dogs: she sings “I wanna feel it”, going back again and again despite the acknowledgement that she will “lose”.
Thursday Girl expands upon these self-destructive notions in a more intense manner. In the absence of a relationship or connection, there is no one to “tell [her] no”, just as there is no one to stop her from betting on losing dogs. She pleads, almost, for someone to stop her, to say no, as she falls further and further down a spiral, as represented by the incessant repetition of “tell me no” which makes up the song’s hook.
My Body’s Made Of Crushed Little Stars is the perfect song to sum up this idea of self-destruction, particularly in the context of self-blame. It turns everything very inwards — no more longing for a long-gone love. It’s all been replaced by an internal frustration. It’s an anger that is all too often felt in depression: “I’m not doing anything”, why am I not doing anything? This juxtaposed with the existential ideas Mitski repeats in the third line of each verse imbue the song with a sense of nihilism. It’s almost the exact opposite of Star from her recent album, which compares the persistence of a star’s life and light to prevailing love. There is none of that here, just an urge to escape in any viable way (“I pick an age when I’m gonna disappear”). Mitski subverts the structure of this song towards the end, to provide finality to the cycle of self-blame and destruction established in previous songs — only it comes with the transition from “come find me” to “go kill me”.
These songs are the want for a release. They’re the feeling you get randomly that you want to scream, or to cry, the back of your mouth tightens up and your lips squeeze downwards, and you have to fight to keep it down. The frustration at inaction, the price of being alone. It’s all very dark isn’t it? Well, a prewarning: things don’t improve from here out. Not for a while.
twenty year summer vacation
The two songs I’ll focus on here are my two favourites from this album, and I don’t know (or don’t want to examine, maybe) what that says about me. After the loss, after coming out from the blame, comes depression. Maybe this section will get slightly more personal.
Fireworks is my second favourite on the album. It’s a song that feels too numb to deserve its title. You expect something big and brash, don’t you? Something explosive. Something reminiscent of Katy Perry. Instead, you get an extended metaphor about depression and pain, and about how ignoring it can make it worse. I can visualise this song so clearly, and I have been able to since my first listen. The image of watching the fireworks overlaps with another of her songs, Carry Me Out. But whilst Carry Me Out is cathartic, Fireworks is anything but. It’s numbness with no end, hoping that a release like crying will save you but finding yourself stuck in a cycle, once again. I find the juxtaposition of this with the fireworks interesting: here is the world, literally bursting with colour, and what do we do but sit on our rooftop and listen to the memories and cry, cry, cry.
Crack Baby, on the other hand, makes me feel sick. It is the feeling of after you cry, when you’ve been crying hard for a while. The ache behind your eyes, the soreness of your throat, the headache. The half-empty glasses of water by the side of your bed, and the tug at the pit of your stomach. A dream I had where I sunk through my bed into a rabbit hole, except there is no Wonderland waiting for me. The want, the hope, the need even to feel something but all that’s waiting is the numbness. The erratic snare, a heartbeat, palpitating more into the second verse, the gallop of wild horses. It’s my favourite on the album. Let me explain.
Crack Baby is a song, to me, about dissociation. I know that it is intended as a metaphor for how unhealthy love is addictive but ultimately detrimental (and this reading should be highlighted), but Mitski’s floaty vocals combined with the “twenty year summer vacation” makes me think about myself, rather selfishly. Summer is my least favourite season, not necessarily due to the heat (which isn’t a massive problem in the UK anyway), but because of the lack of purpose. A “twenty-year summer vacation” to me speaks of a long and roaming life, one with no end goal. It’s my worst nightmare, and it’s the thought I come across every time a dissociative fog descends.
This is the stage where you start questioning, when you look back on where you’ve come from, and the hole you have found yourself in. How did I get here? And what can I do to get myself out?
I will wear my white button-down
A friend of mine choreographed her final Dance GCSE solo to A Burning Hill. She was later told to change the song. I’m not too sure why (maybe it was restrictive to her choreography — I have found that Mitski songs, whilst amazing to listen to, get me stuck in a choreographic rut). But maybe it was because it’s a hard song to ascribe any meaning to, let alone in the form of movement.
A Burning Hill is the epilogue to complete what Happy started. Crack Baby’s last 20 seconds is its introduction. The fire has been lit and now all that’s left to do is come to terms with the burning. It seems to wrap up our themes in one line: destruction (“I am the fire and I am the forest”), depression (“I am the witness watching it, I stand in a valley watching it”) and the loss of love (“and you’re not there at all”).
A Burning Hill does, however, succeed in taking us back around to at least some kind of love. Our narrator, after all this, pledges to “love the littler things” repeating it as an affirmation. She leaves behind her old idea of love, watches it burn, and lets herself be changed by the experience. That’s all we can hope to get from these emotions after all: a change in the way we live, for the better. We want to learn to appreciate other things in life than the romantic relationships we have left, but to begin this you have to first commit to an ending. We sink back into routine, finding comfort in it, the lack of change at least in that capacity, as everything else turns to ash around us. The line “I’ll go to work and I’ll go to sleep” on relisten is reminiscent of “I’ll lay around then I’ll get up and lay back down, romanticise a quiet life” from Phoebe Bridgers’ I Know The End (another fabulous album closer, by the way). In short, A Burning Hill is acknowledging the feeling of emptiness, and acting on the want to start again, to build ourselves back up. An acceptance, of a kind, after we have worked our way constantly in and out of the fourth stage of grief.
love some littler things
The lesson to learn, then, from both this ramble and from the album, is that meaningful connection and acceptance are the direct antithesis to these feelings of numbness. Instead of investing our time in people who will leave unannounced, or let us bet on losing dogs, we should cherish the people closest to us who keep us safe and let us know we are loved. It’s something we don’t do enough, I think.
Cherish the time you have with a person, watch their train leave and feel the rumble as it moves away from you. Let it remind you of them. Don’t hide your love from the world. Life’s too short.
— r <3