(Mostly) Our Love Ours All Ours
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[7.64]
[9]
Andrew Karpan: Sugary and alive, Mitski deserves this, a hit record that will likely be remembered as the millennial answer to “Fade Into You.” Or, as Mitski says it best, in a marketing appearance promoting the song for the Genius brand, “to love is truly the best and most beautiful thing I ever did.”
[10]
Nortey Dowuona: Mitski is apparently a star now. For several years, she made earnest, plaintive songs which were received by a small but willing audience who was delighted to feel the same way as a generational talent who could sincerely speak to them. Then, by Be The Cowboy, she blossomed into a star, something more than a person who made earnest plaintive songs, a massive ball of heat and light who shone so brightly she couldn’t see anything anymore. And of course, she tried to return to being at the very least a white dwarf, but supporting a solar system is so tied to the fact of being alive and being an artist that exploding and erasing the ties that bound her could not be done by deleting Twitter. Mitski, just like the sun that spins the planet on which I wrote this word, was not going to implode because it was valid for her health, her ability to live with being a creator of life would return. And eventually she would return to music as well, creating this slight, barely there country ballad about the possessive nature of her love. The sun loves us just as much as Mitski loves you and could exist without us too, but who would behold its beauty? Not Genius, that’s who.
[9]
Hannah Jocelyn: This song floated by without incident on first listen to The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We – songs like “The Deal” and “I Love Me After You” were more impressive to me, for its reconciliation of Mitski’s claustrophobic distortion with her more traditional songwriting. Then it went stratospheric on TikTok then it went stratospheric everywhere. Maybe it’s because the unassuming quality made it perfect as background music, maybe because it’s two minutes; it might also be really damn good. The qualities that make Mitski so beloved are still there, especially her unpredictable chord progressions and intensity — she can’t go through a love song without a line as theatrical as “nothing in the world belongs to me.” Yet there’s no self-sabotage or dissonance; it’s just plainly beautiful and timeless.
[8]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: She’s always tended towards the jazzy and dirgelike, but this is Mitski in peak form: the lyric is a sketch exquisitely rendered — while on Be the Cowboy, she wrote short stories in her stanzas, this is something even more skeletal, a narrative embedded within the slightest of narrative shifts. Patrick Hyland’s production work has always worked to accentuate the more subtle accomplishments of Mitski’s music; here he outdoes himself, taking what could have been an overly fussy mid-century torch song and allowing it to breathe with a certain country plainspokeness. And yet I do not love “My Love Mine All Mine” quite as much as I want to love it — it feels like a song that answers all of its own questions from an artist that does her best when she leaves more open to interpretation.
[8]
Vikram Joseph: There’s really nothing wrong with what Mitski actually gives us here – a tasteful, timeless-sounding ballad, smooth and crystalline with pedal steel melting into the scenery. I think I just miss the angst and dissonance of her older work – even when Modern Mitski sounds sad, she’s sad in an oddly arch way which sounds like she’s three degrees of separation from the actual sad person. As a pathos-laden expression of dedication, “My Love Mine All Mine” at least works better than “Me And My Husband”, a song I will never be able to take seriously, but it does very little for me.
[5]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Mitski is better when casual poignancy isn’t the point. Her best songs steamroll over you, be they big or small, sad or extra sad. “My Love Mine All Mine” finds a nice Goldilocks zone to secure her a hit, but this lovely ballad is simply just that.
[4]
Alfred Soto: I like Mitski when she gets sinister or worried over programmed beats and yards of guitar. This synth-country landscape flattens her like it did Jenny Lewis and Kacey Musgraves.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: The Nashville instrumentation is just decoration. And the TikTok virality is misleading (or not, if you ignore the conventional wisdom that everything that blows up there is memeshit). On Be the Cowboy, Mitski’s music began a slow arc toward Jerome Kern balladry and songbook standards, and “My Love Mine All Mine” continues the drift. What she loses in visceral emotion, she gains in haunting lineage.
[8]
Tara Hillegeist: “Lynchian” is an adjective applied to excess most often in film, rather than music; Mitski’s career provides ample food for thought as to the reasons for such a disparity. The birthing pangs of her current style were anything but as simple, as many of her past musical compositions often aspired to be — to pack such naive melodies with enough antic heartache that one’s ribcage bears the internal bruise is an aspiration that can easily go awry and leave one stranded in the land of the maudlin and mawkish, rather than piercingly insightful, and there’s more than a few examples of both littering Mitski’s back catalog by now. But to listen to “My Love”‘s almost lysergic deployment of a swooning orchestral blush; the way Mitski’s voice ripens almost to rotting with that obsessive slow-dance of a chorus … this is music for the bugs to pick clean an American corpse to. Angelo Badalamenti would be proud.
[9]
Tim de Reuse: Dripping with Nashville cash, Mitski’s pathos no longer derives from a plucky indie-upstart unpredictability. There is no unsteadiness in her voice anymore; she chews the microphone to sing about the end of her life, wishing only for a symbolic, cosmic victory. Here she plays a ghost, or a corpse, preserved in a glossy, gelatinous mix, and barely able to raise her voice above a casual mutter. It’s gorgeous, and also deeply unnerving. I didn’t know Mitski could do unnerving. Even in death, she surprises.
[8]
Jonathan Bradley: A twilit romantic slow jam that draws cozy darkness as literally from its slow organ drift and sepia pedal steel as it does its actual moonbeam lyric. This is comfortable terrain for Mitski, whom I picture composing every one of her songs while driving along a rural road on a dark night, but there’s no shame in repeating yourself if you’re good at it.
[7]
Brad Shoup: In my household, “My Love Mine All Mine” is most notable for getting Caitlin Rose into the Top 40. She’s only here on vocals, but her ethos — cozy existentialism that uses the pedal steel like a flashlight — is all over this. This may not be as distinctive as, like, the plaintive noise-pop of “I Don’t Smoke.” But the sway is still the same. And her impossible requests are just as devastating.
[8]
Oliver Maier: Sometimes I don’t think I know how to write about music. I think everyone who tries it has probably felt that way at some point, some sense of the inadequacy of their words, the impulse to throw up their hands and say “just listen to it” (complimentary) or “just listen to it” (derogatory), because what do you say about a song that it doesn’t say itself? What an extraordinary act of arrogance to attach yourself to something someone made and try to explain it to anyone, however careful or empathetic you are in doing so, however many times you qualify your opinion. I imagine this anxiety probably lurks in some form, in some place, inside everyone who has tried to do this stupid, circuitous, fucking frustrating thing. People like to talk about things, though. It feels good to do, like a magic bridge that you can feel forming between yourself and someone else when they articulate something that was inside you too. I listened to this song non-stop for a week when it came out, and I barely know what to say about it. I think it’s wonderful. Just listen to it. I feel very emotional thinking about Mitski and the path of her career in a way that makes me a bit embarrassed. I feel very emotional hearing her sing about the fundamental, indissoluble value of a feeling that she has, only holding it, not needing to clutch or cradle it, letting its light seep out from between her fingers. I find it so moving to hear someone who has — largely unwillingly, it must be said — become a symbol of self-pity and depressive angst sing with such easy generosity towards themselves. It’s hard when you are so used to seeing a magic bridge between yourself and another person collapse, or perhaps when you rarely see it built at all, to reserve some dignity for the silly, hopeful part of yourself that keeps seeking out planning permission. Just listen to it. What an extraordinary act of arrogance to attach yourself to another person and think they could see you and think about you the way that you do them. Sometimes I don’t think I know how to be in love. I’m going to keep trying anyway.
[10]