Be the Cowboy is a multidimensional exploration of the imagination of a lonely artist. Mitski, returning with her fifth album, a brisk collection of songs, writes from the perspectives of characters she both loves and hates to escape her overpowerful feelings of isolation.
Some songs (and characters) are obviously satirical: “Me and My Husband” features the lines “And I'm the idiot with the painted face / In the corner, taking up space / But when he walks in, I am loved, I am loved,” over a rompy piano jam. Camp is an instrumental part of Mitski’s writing on Be the Cowboy, where Mitski cosplays mid-century family values to reveal truths about herself. This itself is a reclamation of power, to exclaim that Mitski knows her “dreams” of unequal marriages are incredibly unjustified. However, through these character exercises, there is an honest feeling of desperation for some kind of dependability and companionship.
The unravelling of Mitski’s characters comes on the song “Blue Light,” where she sings “Somebody kiss me, I'm going crazy / I'm walking 'round the house naked,” then interrupts her chain of thought with wordless singing. Around her, synths swell up, shedding the almost comic instrumental at the beginning to display intensely crazed feelings of despair.
To write about Be the Cowboy without mention of its fantastic single, “Nobody,” would practically be heresy. Mitski conjures a chant of “nobody, nobody, nobody,” over a danceable disco number, until the word itself loses meaning, reclaiming power over her insecurity-filled loneliness; this repetition makes her thoughts hypnotically dissolve into words and music. Here, Be the Cowboy’s greatest strength is revealed: the ability to mutate feelings into antimatter.
Great writeup Reed, inspired me to give it another listen!! I’ll add that Why Didn’t You Stop Me? is a songwriting masterclass — 2 different (purely instrumental) hooks that are total earworms, plus an insane amount of tension that builds up over just a minute and a half