How Mitski’s ‘My Love Mine All Mine’ Became a Chart Hit

Have you looked at the Billboard Hot 100 lately? If not, you’re in for a treat. The Christmas classics have flooded in and shaken everything up, making for one slightly surreal snow globe that features Doja Cat, Bing Crosby, Burl Ives, and Gunna all rocking around the same tree. Speaking of which: Sixty-five years after its release, Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” is finally at Number One. In another 65 years, “Cruel Summer” will probably still be in the Top 10. If we’re lucky, Jason Aldean’s “Try That In a Small Town” will be only a distant memory.

But here’s the good news: Mitski is on the Hot 100 right now, too, with her first-ever bona fide hit, “My Love Mine All Mine.” Released as a single on Oct. 3, the song is spending its 10th week on the chart, currently at Number 53 (it peaked at Number 26). The track is off The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, her seventh studio LP, released on Dead Oceans early this fall. It’s a stirring standout from the album, where Mitski croons like a lounge singer at a smoky club against a pedal steel that’s dripping in twilight twang. It’s about as different as you can get from a club-pop hit like Dua Lipa’s “Houdini,” and yet it’s there, exactly one slot below Dua.

Mitski’s hit is a huge victory for indie rock and for her diehard fans who’ve been championing her for more than a decade. It’s a little overwhelming, and very overdue. She’s been building toward wider recognition for years, steadily raising the stakes from fierce, raw records like 2014’s Bury Me at Makeout Creek and 2016’s Puberty 2 to more polished achievements like 2018’s Be the Cowboy and 2021’s Laurel Hell. That’s given her a résumé stacked with gut-wrenching gems (“I Bet on Losing Dogs,” “Francis Forever,” “Two Slow Dancers”) and glittery bangers that should have been hits (“Washing Machine Heart,” “Nobody”). But none of those songs have made it onto the Hot 100. So why now? Why this particular song?

“It really stands out and separates itself from the rest of Mitski’s catalog,” Jon Coombs, the vice president of A&R at Secretly Group, which owns Dead Oceans, tells Rolling Stone. “She’s always tackling big questions, but this one is concerned with the idea of love from an existential point of view. In other songs, she sings ‘I want a love that falls as fast as a body from a balcony’ — that’s really, really intense and dramatic. This feels a little more universal, and it’s something most people can relate to.” 

That’s not to say that the label wasn’t surprised. “Every week we’re like, ‘Surely it must start to plateau or flatline, and then we’ll have our biggest day,’” says Jessica Park, Secretly’s global label director. “And we’re like, ‘Wait, what’s happening?’ We knew we had to buckle down and continue working on it.” Or, as Coombs puts it, “We’re running a marathon.” 

As with many hits these days, TikTok is a major factor in driving the song. Mitski has 1.2 million followers on the platform, but the song itself has 9.8 billion views (it’s spent six weeks at Number One on Billboard’s new TikTok chart). The song’s universal quality makes it the perfect soundtrack for any kind of TikTok: A toddler locking eyes with a dog; makeup tips; gripping scenes of Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women; lasagna soup. 

“Washing Machine Heart” and “Nobody” were also successful on TikTok, but not to this degree. “What’s really notable is that typically people will discover music on TikTok, but they won’t actually come over to Spotify to stream it,” says Park. “We see a really high conversion rate of fans discovering on TikTok and then coming over to actually listen to multiple songs in her catalog.” 

Mitski currently has 34.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, a stat that puts her at Number 95 on the platform’s highest-streaming artists worldwide, according to a document provided by the label. If it keeps going this way, “My Love Mine All Mine” is on track to become Secretly Group’s highest-streamed song on Spotify to date. (Some other contenders: Phoebe Bridgers and Maggie Rogers’ cover of “Iris,” and, yes, Mitski’s own “Washing Machine Heart.”)

Coombs, who’s been at Secretly Group for more than a decade, can only compare the Mitski song’s slow and steady ascent to Bon Iver’s debut For Emma, Forever Ago, which came out on Dead Oceans’ sister label Jagjaguwar in 2008. “In the heyday of iTunes and CDs, week [after] week it was like ‘Oh, my God, we did more. Oh, my God, we did more.’ It reminds me a lot of the same energy around that, and we’re seeing [Mitski] happen daily.” 

According to Park, that energy — whether through DSPs, radio, or TikTok — extends far beyond the United States. “Very quickly we realized it was connecting globally,” she says, noting that one of the song’s biggest territories is the Philippines. The label targeted countless streaming playlists, from Today’s Top Hits to Sad Girl Starter Pack. “Obviously Mitski is viewed as an indie artist and we’re an indie label, and so we had a lot of strides to overcome to show the world that this is a real contender,” Park says. “We just felt the power behind it and we knew that it had so much room to grow.”

One last question: What does Mitski, who has long been open about her complicated feelings toward the music industry, feel about this? “She’s obviously very excited,” Coombs says. “But I don’t think it’s the first thing she thinks about when she wakes up.”

Have you looked at the Billboard Hot 100 lately? If not, you’re in for a treat. The Christmas classics have flooded in and shaken everything up, making for one slightly surreal snow globe that features Doja Cat, Bing Crosby, Burl Ives, and Gunna all rocking around the same tree. Speaking of which: Sixty-five years after its release, Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” is finally at Number One. In another 65 years, “Cruel Summer” will probably still be in the Top 10. If we’re lucky, Jason Aldean’s “Try That In a Small Town” will be only a distant memory.

But here’s the good news: Mitski is on the Hot 100 right now, too, with her first-ever bona fide hit, “My Love Mine All Mine.” Released as a single on Oct. 3, the song is spending its 10th week on the chart, currently at Number 53 (it peaked at Number 26). The track is off The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, her seventh studio LP, released on Dead Oceans early this fall. It’s a stirring standout from the album, where Mitski croons like a lounge singer at a smoky club against a pedal steel that’s dripping in twilight twang. It’s about as different as you can get from a club-pop hit like Dua Lipa’s “Houdini,” and yet it’s there, exactly one slot below Dua.

Mitski’s hit is a huge victory for indie rock and for her diehard fans who’ve been championing her for more than a decade. It’s a little overwhelming, and very overdue. She’s been building toward wider recognition for years, steadily raising the stakes from fierce, raw records like 2014’s Bury Me at Makeout Creek and 2016’s Puberty 2 to more polished achievements like 2018’s Be the Cowboy and 2021’s Laurel Hell. That’s given her a résumé stacked with gut-wrenching gems (“I Bet on Losing Dogs,” “Francis Forever,” “Two Slow Dancers”) and glittery bangers that should have been hits (“Washing Machine Heart,” “Nobody”). But none of those songs have made it onto the Hot 100. So why now? Why this particular song?

“It really stands out and separates itself from the rest of Mitski’s catalog,” Jon Coombs, the vice president of A&R at Secretly Group, which owns Dead Oceans, tells Rolling Stone. “She’s always tackling big questions, but this one is concerned with the idea of love from an existential point of view. In other songs, she sings ‘I want a love that falls as fast as a body from a balcony’ — that’s really, really intense and dramatic. This feels a little more universal, and it’s something most people can relate to.” 

That’s not to say that the label wasn’t surprised. “Every week we’re like, ‘Surely it must start to plateau or flatline, and then we’ll have our biggest day,’” says Jessica Park, Secretly’s global label director. “And we’re like, ‘Wait, what’s happening?’ We knew we had to buckle down and continue working on it.” Or, as Coombs puts it, “We’re running a marathon.” 

As with many hits these days, TikTok is a major factor in driving the song. Mitski has 1.2 million followers on the platform, but the song itself has 9.8 billion views (it’s spent six weeks at Number One on Billboard’s new TikTok chart). The song’s universal quality makes it the perfect soundtrack for any kind of TikTok: A toddler locking eyes with a dog; makeup tips; gripping scenes of Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women; lasagna soup. 

“Washing Machine Heart” and “Nobody” were also successful on TikTok, but not to this degree. “What’s really notable is that typically people will discover music on TikTok, but they won’t actually come over to Spotify to stream it,” says Park. “We see a really high conversion rate of fans discovering on TikTok and then coming over to actually listen to multiple songs in her catalog.” 

Mitski currently has 34.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, a stat that puts her at Number 95 on the platform’s highest-streaming artists worldwide, according to a document provided by the label. If it keeps going this way, “My Love Mine All Mine” is on track to become Secretly Group’s highest-streamed song on Spotify to date. (Some other contenders: Phoebe Bridgers and Maggie Rogers’ cover of “Iris,” and, yes, Mitski’s own “Washing Machine Heart.”)

Coombs, who’s been at Secretly Group for more than a decade, can only compare the Mitski song’s slow and steady ascent to Bon Iver’s debut For Emma, Forever Ago, which came out on Dead Oceans’ sister label Jagjaguwar in 2008. “In the heyday of iTunes and CDs, week [after] week it was like ‘Oh, my God, we did more. Oh, my God, we did more.’ It reminds me a lot of the same energy around that, and we’re seeing [Mitski] happen daily.” 

According to Park, that energy — whether through DSPs, radio, or TikTok — extends far beyond the United States. “Very quickly we realized it was connecting globally,” she says, noting that one of the song’s biggest territories is the Philippines. The label targeted countless streaming playlists, from Today’s Top Hits to Sad Girl Starter Pack. “Obviously Mitski is viewed as an indie artist and we’re an indie label, and so we had a lot of strides to overcome to show the world that this is a real contender,” Park says. “We just felt the power behind it and we knew that it had so much room to grow.”

One last question: What does Mitski, who has long been open about her complicated feelings toward the music industry, feel about this? “She’s obviously very excited,” Coombs says. “But I don’t think it’s the first thing she thinks about when she wakes up.”