I Love Me After You

Album: The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We (2023)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song has the feel of a freedom found from moving on from a failed relationship. Mitski sings about walking around the house naked with the curtains open - a liberating experience. It's in the vein of a much more mainstream song from this time period: "Flowers," where Miley decides she can love herself better than her ex.
  • The uneasy soundscape is by design to fit the mood, but for a while, Mitski wanted the song to be acoustic. It was her producer, Patrick Hyland, who changed her mind.

    "I made a grave mistake when trying to figure out the production for this song," she said in a video. "I wrote it on acoustic guitar and vocals. That's not the mistake, but I recorded myself playing it on just acoustic guitar and singing along, and I listened to that demo I made over and over and over just trying to figure out how the end result track should sound, and I just couldn't couldn't hear what it should sound like. The problem with that is, inevitably you get used used to things, familiar. And you start liking what you get used to. I love familiar things, so sooner or later I just got so used to the version that's just the acoustic guitar and the voice, and when I brought it to Patrick, he kept suggesting great ideas about how it should be produced, and every time I'd be like, 'I just want it to be acoustic guitar and voice. The thing that I'm used to.'

    There's a time and place of course for just acoustic guitar and voice - Lord knows I've done tracks that are just that - but I knew deep down with this track it could be something else and I was just getting in my own way. So eventually Patrick convinced me to do the version that it is today, which I'm glad he did. He wanted to try to figure out a way to make it sound like you're crawling through through something in slow motion. To make that sound we played it much faster and higher then slowed it down, literally, so it sounds like it's slowed down.

    I'm quite happy with it now, especially when it really hits, because you know I love a climax."
  • This is the last song on Mitski's album The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We. The last line, "I'm king of all the land," calls back to the album title.

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