Mitski has been all over the internet, but her most recognizable track, “My Love Mine All Mine,” has remained iconic 3 years later. The song garnered most of its popularity from TikTok when it came out in 2023, but also reached No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100. When Consequence chose “My Love Mine All Mine” as their top song of 2023, they said, “Leave it to Mitski to write one of the loveliest melodies of the decade, set it to tear-inducing lyrics and instrumentation that destroys cynicism with surgical accuracy, and then keep the tune to a brisk two minutes and change.”
While Mitski seemed to avoid promoting the song, in a video she says, “I know this is corny, but I was really thinking it’s this love I feel in me, that I’ve created in me, that I’ve built in me, that I’ve held on to, and it’s mine for as long as I want it, for as long as I don’t give it up or let the world take it from me,” and, “I wanted to write a song about how I wish that when I die, I could at least leave all this love behind in the world.”
The melody is rather simple, sitting in Mitski’s chest voice and staying there. It almost feels like a lullaby or hymn. The chord progression cycles through Amaj7, C-Sharp7, and then D, but it caps itself off with D minor, adding a sense of motion when the progression repeats itself.
While on TikTok, “My Love Mine All Mine” was mostly used as a background track to photo albums of people’s partners, the song seems to reject that idea of romantic love, quite literally saying, “Nothing in the world belongs to me but my love, mine, all mine, all mine.” All we have on this earth is our own love and what we choose to do with it.
In a Substack article, JAY & SEJ state: “To have nothing— to know that you have nothing but your love, is a beautiful conclusion to come to. The possibilities of what you can do with your love is endless, but for those that insist on using that love only to love one other shelters themselves from the unimaginable. If nothing in the world belongs to you except for your love, why wouldn’t you choose to love yourself first before all other things that do not belong to you?”
