“I’m not a big Pride person. In my opinion, Pride equals consumerism and conformity. I’m much more into the idea of gay shame, militant rebellion, and resistance to assimilation. Since I live in the middle of the old, gay Greenwich Village and right above a raunchy lesbian bar, Henrietta Hudson, I’ll probably try to escape the city altogether, just like I did in previous years. What can be better than celebrating Pride out in nature? Maybe I’ll even put on my pink thong to show to the neighbors how extra proud (or ashamed) I am!” – Slava Mogutin

SLAVA MOGUTIN x LOGAN LYNN
for HuffPost Queer Voices (2012)

In the spring of 2017 I had the chance to sit down with Mitski to talk about music, self-care, and what was happening in her life at the time as she transitioned from being an IYKYK indie artist to being very well known across the globe. During that conversation she said a bunch of thoughtful, incredibly tender things, but this part has always stuck with me:

“I think the most important process for understanding the world and what’s going on in yourself is to name things. We name streets, flowers, people, experiences, identities – we need to name a thing in order to make sense of it. I think songwriting is another naming process, where you give a name to a big muck inside you, or at least a little part of the big muck, in order to feel like you know it, and know where to put it. So I could say that writing songs has been a gateway to a deeper understanding of myself, but I actually think songwriting has given me a much simpler understanding of myself, in that all these messy, dark, unknowable things can be named, and become 3-minute songs to put on an iPhone instead of stirring in the big goop of the mind.”

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MITSKI x LOGAN LYNN

“Naming The Big Muck Inside You”

Read our chat in full HERE.