Should've Been Me

Album: Laurel Hell (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this baroque pop tune from her Laurel Hell album, Mitski shows compassion for her cheating partner, who moved on with a look-alike of the singer, and shoulders some of the blame for being emotionally unavailable. "You wanted me but couldn't reach me," she sings, "I'm sorry, it should've been me."

    "This song is roughly about being cheated on but also understands why," Mitski told Pitchfork. "I wanted to write a song about cheating that came from understanding and compassion and empathy. The thing is when you're in a relationship, you get to know a person and you love a person fully for who they are. And you understand all of their flaws and their good side and their bad side. I think in a real relationship, a person doesn't just become a villain because they did something wrong.

    The more I need forgiveness, the more open I become to forgiving. And I think I just need a lot of forgiveness and acceptance of myself, and that made me open to writing about forgiving other people. I just need to lighten the load and not have so much anger and shame and sadness. And I think forgiveness is the way to go for that."
  • Laurel Hell, Mitski's sixth album, finds her attempting to reconnect with herself after the grind of the music industry nearly snuffed out her creative spark. "I had found that in order to survive the music industry, I had numbed my heart and disconnected from myself. And then, after a while of actively disconnecting from myself, day after day, you really do become disconnected," she told Crack magazine. "Suddenly I found that I really was numb, like the way I wanted to be, but I then couldn't write music, because you can't write music from a place of being completely detached from yourself."

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