Heat Lightning

Album: Laurel Hell (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this R&B-influenced slow jam, Mitski is wide awake at 4 a.m. contemplating her emotions as heat lightning flashes outside her window. She told Pitchfork the song is about insomnia and giving up - "but in a good way."
  • The track ties in with the album's theme of surrender. "I needed love songs about real relationships that are not power struggles to be won or lost," she explained in a press release. "I needed songs that could help me forgive both others and myself. I make mistakes all the time. I don't want to put on a front where I'm a role model, but I'm also not a bad person. I needed to create this space mostly for myself where I sat in that gray area."
  • She told Pitchfork how the tune evolved with the help of her producer, Patrick Hyland, saying, "Initially the whole song basically sounded like the first half of it, but something didn't feel right. It just felt boring. And then Patrick [Hyland] came up with the idea of having it depart into this whole new sound. We drew inspiration from Prince in a little bit more of and R&B feel to it."
  • Mitski and Hyland first met as college students when Mitski sought him out because she needed a production student for a project she was working on. Since then, Hyland has produced nearly all of the singer's albums.

    "We just work well together," she said. "And I think I keep going back to working with him because now there's a trust. Most of the time we don't even have to talk, we just understand. When you're making an album, you just have to allow yourself to be so vulnerable and ugly, and I have a hard time being that in front of people I don't know very well."
  • This is the third single from Laurel Hell, following "Working For The Knife" and "The Only Heartbreaker."
  • Laurel Hell is her first full-length release since 2018's Be The Cowboy. In the interim, she contemplated giving up her music career but thought better of it. She did, however, decide to make changes in her approach to songwriting.

    "I don't want to make another Be The Cowboy," she told Crack magazine. "I knew that I didn't want to make music that was putting up walls against the listener. At the time I felt I needed to in order to protect myself, but that's not why I make music. At the end of the day, the music that touches me and has saved me is the stuff that goes right to my heart and feels personal, authentic and true."

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