Details: Mitski album, "Be The Cowboy," released on Dead Oceans. The tape also includes the track, "Why Didn't You Stop Me" (side A, track 2) but not in the track listing of the cover (misprint). Cassette shell is "smoke" color. New stock, sealed.

Description: "... The self-abasement of desire is strewn across these 14 songs as our heroine seeks out old lovers for secret trysts that end in disappointment, and cannot help but indulge in the masochistic pleasure of blowing up the stability of long-term partnership. In “A Pearl” Mitski sings of how intoxicating it is to hold onto pain. “I wrote so many songs about being in love and being hurt by love. You think your life is horrible when you’re heartbroken, but when you no longer have love or heartbreak in your life, you think, wasn’t it nice when things still hurt? There’s a nostalgia for blind love, a wonderful heady kind of love.”

Infused with a pink glow and mysterious blue light, the performer in Be The Cowboy makes a pact with her audience that the show must go on, but as we draw nearer to the end, a charming ditty recedes into ghostly, faded melancholia, as an angelic voice breaks through to make direct communication. “Two Slow Dancers” closes out the album in a school gymnasium, though we’re no longer in the territory of adolescence. Instead, we’re projected into the future where a pair of old lovers reunite. “They used to have something together that is no longer there and they’re trying to relive it in a dance, knowing that they’ll have to go home and go back to their lives.” It’s funny how only the very old and the very young are permitted to indulge openly in dreams, encouraged to reflect and dwell in poetry. In making a record that is about growing old while Mitski herself is still young, a soft truth emerges: sometimes we feel oldest when we are still young, and sometimes who we were when we were young never goes away, leaving behind a glowing pearl that we roll around endlessly in the dark."--Jenny Zhang 

Grade: M (new stock)

TRACK LISTING SIDE A:

A1. Geyser
A2. Why Didn't You Stop Me
A3. Old Friend
A4. A Pearl
A5. Lonesome Love
A6. Remember My Name
A7. Me And My Husband

TRACK LISTING SIDE B:

B1. Come Into The Water
B2. Nobody
B3. Pink In The Night
B4. A Horse Named Cold Air
B5. Washing Machine Heart
B6. Blue Light
B7. Two Slow Dancers