Two Slow Dancers: How Mitski Silences Central Park

Looking back at my favorite concert of this past year while unsure when the next will be

She didn’t wait long before returning for her encore. After performing some of the most destructive and delicate songs from the last five albums and seven years of her career, Mitski came to the Central Park stage one last time before retiring indefinitely.

It would be wrong to say Mitski just plays or sings her work, she really performs them. On stage her movements reflect the physical tension and release of her lyrics. Her lone props are a plain white table and chair. Whether emulating a family dinner, a confession, or a meeting of sorts, there is no mistaking that the audience came here to listen.

The songs tended to bleed into one another, the result of a perfectly varied and curated setlist. When at one of the few pauses Mitski takes to address the audience, she plainly says “Thank you. This is all I have ever wanted in my life,” and it’s impossible not to believe her. Separate from the performer, she is the artist and poet who wrote songs like “My Body Is Made Of Crushed Little Stars,” “Townie,” and “Liquid Smooth.” When she came out for her last moment in the spotlight, it’s all the more clear why.

Standing motionless centerstage for the first time of the night, the opening piano keys of “Two Slow Dancers” rang out. The final track off her beloved 2018 release Be The Cowboy, the song is a lament on the conflicts between love and aging, memory and change. She sang the first line, “Does it smell like a school gymnasium in here,” and listeners could picture what she means. A perfect example of the mutual poignancy and specificity present in her lyrics that caused this entire New York crowd to seem as if they knew all of them.

Mitski looked into the audience, the one she had just professed to have fulfilled her whole life, and her eyes appeared without pupils. The blinding strobe lights and reflection of her white t-shirt revealed her to appear as some sort of oracle, aiding lost souls in her hand-crafted prophecies. As she paused between lines the only sound to be heard were crickets and the buzz of an amplifier. Thirty-seven million annual visitors, but at that moment Central Park was Mitski’s. Audience members sang along softly in respect for the tenderness of the experience, or perhaps because they were too breathless to muster much else.

As the transcendent instrumental ensued after the chorus, smoke poured out from above, illuminated by the stunning white stage lights. An artificial heaven was created, ready to accept Mitski into her hiatus from brilliance.

It takes a real presence to create intimacy and sensitivity between strangers in a hostile city on a humid summer night. Mitski not only accomplished this, but spread a sense of pure belief in the power of performance, in music, and in the self.

On her 2016 lead single “Your Best American Girl,” Mitski sings “Well I’m not the moon, I’m not even a star.” After this performance, nothing could be less true.