First love/Late Spring Analysis
First Love/Late Spring is a truly heartbreaking song. I personally believe it was crafted to represent how much of an impact that the typical ‘first love’ brings to people. The song seems to starts off with a simple line, speaking of the person our narrator, Mitski, is singing to. With assumption that the person whom the song is written for is peacefully dreaming. ‘The black hole of the window where you sleep.’ I see it that they have the window cracked open and the fresh smell of spring lingers into the room, this is important to me due to the way that the Proust effect functions. Certain smells can trigger pleasant (or unpleasant) memories, and Mitski speaks of this smell as if everytime she smells it, she’s reminded of her partner.
It then leads into ‘Wild women don’t get the blues.’ I think that Mitski is speaking on women who aren’t restrained to a certain lifestyle. They don’t have to worry about looks, about relationships, about jobs or even life itself. They are free, they are wild, almost like horses. In reference to the song ‘Crack Baby’ I think of the line ‘Wild horses running through your hollow bones… You don’t know what you want, but you know that you want it bad.’ Mitski cannot understand her feelings at first, so rather she desires a sense of freedom. A capability to understand life itself and to free herself from the social standards and release herself from the constant pressure that women are put under, simply for being women. She feels like people, I.E. women, that are able to disconnect and live freely, have the same freedom from sadness. Thus, ‘don’t get the blues.’ They don’t have to conform to the social norms/standards, and due to it, they don’t constantly feel like they’re carrying the weight of the world alone.
Following, ‘But lately I’ve been crying like a tall child,’ Mitski herself, could be referencing her own life as a ‘wild woman.’ With the word usage of ‘but.’ It speaks as if she’s experienced this freedom, maybe as a young girl, but now that she’s older and she views the world as it is and not through rose colored glasses, she yearns for the life she had before. She yearned for the life of a young child running around playing with her friends, but rather she’s stuck as an adult, a ‘tall child,’ who craves her childhood again and this is why she sees herself as just a kid.
The next verse reminds me of a panic attack. ‘So please, hurry, leave me, I can’t breathe.’ She becomes anxious of this love as it roughens. They argue, fight, and the relationship starts to deteriorate. She wants, arguably she begs her partner to leave her. To let her sit in her own grief of the failing or already dead relationship. ‘Please don’t say you love me.’ She doesn’t want to cling onto the relationship anymore. The Japanese following these lines, ‘胸がはち切れそうで ‘ translates to ‘My heart seems like it’s going to burst/My chest is about to burst.’ Mitski is angry, scared, and alone now. All these emotions tighten in her chest. Her breath is probably short from the feelings and due to this she feels as if she’ll explode from the inside from all the built up emotions releasing at once. She wants to leave but something is holding her back.
The next lines, tie perfectly into the previous one. ‘One word from you and I would jump off of this ledge I’m on,’ she pauses ‘baby.’ She still feels strong enough to her lover to use a nickname, even through an argument or possible breakup. She states that she’d do anything they want, even if it means being without them. She’s willing to jump off, give herself, her life, everything, to make them happy. She sees herself an an extension of her partner. Her reason to exist is for their happiness- not her own, but theirs and theirs alone. Alas, ‘tell me don’t so I can crawl back in’ signifies that she hopes deep down they don’t desire such a drastic route, but rather they will take her in and hold her tight. Half of her thinks she’s made for them, half of her simply desires a relationship to be held, appreciated, and loved in.
‘And I was so young, when I behaved twenty-five.’ In my personal experiences, and possibly in Mitski’s as well, young, or in this case ‘First’ love is always the hardest. You’re still growing, still learning. People tend to seek out more in a shorter period of time because they’ve never experienced such a feeling before and they crave it more and more as the time passes. I see this line, similar to the previous one of her growing up. Rather this time, instead of desiring to be a child again, she now admits that even as a child she behaved this way. She never truly got to settle down into a childhood but rather was thrown into the world. This life she desires, barely existed, or maybe never even did. She wanted more out of life while she was younger, I assume as a teenager, so she did more. Perhaps rather than waiting, she went out and acted in a way as an attempt to feel more in control of herself. Myself, personally, I connect this line with virginity. Something that’s ‘supposed’ to be saved for marriage and/or adulthood, especially in Catholic/Christian beliefs (a common reoccurring theme in Mitski’s music,) being taken away as a teenager in a last ditch effort to save a relationship, but alas it fails, and now she feels dread that she gave away something so special to her, and that she was attempting to be somebody she wasn’t to impress a person she’s drifting from.
‘And I don't wanna go home yet. Let me walk to the top of the big night sky’ She knows the relationship is over, yes she can’t bring herself to accept it. Rather, she wishes to stay, to reminisce on the past and to wander the memories she had. As time passes, assumingely as the late spring fades into summer time, she realizes that this is it. Her first love is over, and now she has to bear the burden of it. As the seasons change, so does she. Now, here she is, accepting her fate without the lover, accepting being alone.
Now, what does this all mean? What does the overall summary of this song?
I think that First Love/Late Spring is a song written to cope. It’s made for Mitski, our narrator, to show that First Love, while exciting, isn’t worth the excruciating pain you‘ll likely to put yourself through. That eventually it will fade away similar to seasons, and that in the end, there’s nothing we can do about it except accept it. You have to be patient and able to come to the conclusion that it won’t always work out the way you want it to, so rather than attempting to rush through it or to change yourself to fix it, it’s best to cut your losses. It’s a song about relationships failing, the heartbreak and denial that comes with it, and the refusal, but eventual acceptance of it all.