Her parents, who are retired, and her sister, who has an international-studies degree, now live in the States. Mitski stores stuff at her parents’ house, in suburban Pennsylvania, and sometimes stays there. Habits from her peripatetic adolescence—when she never really tried to hold on to friends, because she knew that she’d soon be moving again—have been hard to shake. Nevertheless, though she identifies herself as something of a loner, she resents it when she is described in articles as “intensely private.” In early May, she told me in an e-mail, “I have social media accounts, I answer honestly in interviews—and anyone who sees me perform can tell I’m in love with human beings, I want desperately to feel connected. Everything I do is for my love of, and yearning for, people. So press outlets nonetheless insisting I’m ‘intensely private’ feels vindictive, like a punishment for setting boundaries, and for not offering more of myself for content and exploitation.”

Among musicians, Mitski is known as a quietly generous colleague. Phoebe Bridgers told me that, after she signed her first record deal, Mitski wrote to her to say that being a performer “can be very isolating,” and offered, “Let me know if you ever want to talk about anything.” Bridgers added, “I know she’s done that for a ton of my friends, at varying levels of their careers.” The musician Sasami Ashworth told me that Mitski was “sort of a mother hen.” When Ashworth was about to go on tour without merch—she couldn’t afford any—Mitski told her she’d never make enough money just by performing in clubs, and immediately sent her five hundred dollars to have T-shirts printed. Ashworth also noted that Mitski is “very conscious of who she brings on tour—having opening acts she wants to uplift personally, financially, and professionally.” She went on, “Mitski doesn’t necessarily talk about feminism all the time on Twitter, but she has so many women of color and queer people working with her.” The two acts that opened for Mitski in 2016—Japanese Breakfast and Jay Som—are both fronted by Asian-American women. That triple bill was “sort of legendary,” Ashworth said.

One thing that Mitski dislikes about touring is that she lacks time to read, because, she wrote to me, she can “get sick from reading in cars (and I’m always in cars).” She’s been training herself “to read in vehicles again,” she said, “and my body is back to its childhood resilience when I’d do the day’s homework on the bus to school.” Lately, she has been trying to get through the Bible, “just to actually know what’s in this book a lot of people use as a reason for their actions.” She noted, “It’s been hard as someone who hasn’t grown up with it.” She has also been reading the short stories of Mary Gaitskill, on her phone.

The signature single from “Be the Cowboy,” the gorgeous “Nobody,” was shaped by the unusual rhythms of Mitski’s life. After a tour of Asia and Australia ended, she considered flying back to the States, but it was Christmastime and tickets were too expensive, so she stayed on, alone, in Kuala Lumpur, in a sublet. “I always think of myself as an independent woman who doesn’t need anybody,” she told me. “I was completely, unexpectedly crushed by the fact that I not only didn’t know anyone in the country but it was the holidays, and everyone’s with their family and I wasn’t.” She is nothing if not resourceful, though, so she bought a toy piano at a Toys R Us. Back at the apartment, she started plinking away, and sketched out a cri de coeur, set to an incongruous disco beat, that starts with the lines “My God, I’m so lonely / so I open the window / to hear sounds of people.” By capturing this moment in her life, and recording what it felt like, she was soothed.

Mitski sometimes tells herself that she doesn’t need a home, and can make a life for herself anywhere. But, she noted, “my friends are, like, ‘You really need to find a place to live,’ and I do think maybe it’s a little dangerous for me to not grow roots a little bit—to go further and further out into untethered rootlessness.”

Michelle Zauner told me that Mitski does not like to be thought of as some sort of “fevered priestess.” Yet an inevitable result of writing majestically emotional songs is that you incite a lot of emotion in response. It’s not uncommon for Mitski’s fans to say that they would die for her, which is a little distressing, even as a figure of speech. The comments on her YouTube videos are fervent: one poster wrote of hearing the song “Class of 2013,” “I die a sad and painful, beautiful death and am born anew.” The online following that she commands is loyal in a way that can turn militant—some people leap to her defense against presumed musical rivals, for instance, whether she wants them to or not—and she sometimes pleads with her fans not to “say hateful things on the internet.” Although the idea of being a role model makes her nervous, she occasionally offers her young admirers a broader perspective. As she recently wrote on Twitter, “alright. Honored to serve as minor clickbait profit generator + light distraction from the hellish real world for the day but i feel v empty from looking at this phone screen for so long, let’s all please stop and get out of here. Thanks to everyone who cares for my music, truly!”

The devotion of strangers freaks Mitski out, and the demands of social media alienate her. “I’m terrified of crowds,” she told me. “I’ve always been someone who’s outside of crowds and either at the mercy of crowds or just observing them. So seeing mob mentality unfold in front of me, because of me, is just terrifying.” Sometimes, she said, she wishes that she had adopted a distancing approach similar to that of the pop singer Sia, who conceals her face onstage and generally does not appear in her music videos. A few weeks ago, Mitski shut down her popular Twitter account. In an e-mail, she told me, “I always hated what social media did to my brain, and now that I’m not on it I feel a significant difference. It shortened my attention span, created a feeling of anxiety and distraction throughout the day, even when I wasn’t physically on it, and it demanded that I accept hundreds of strangers’ daily cruelty, simply for making them aware that I exist.” She’d stayed on Twitter to promote her shows and her records, but, with most of the current tour behind her and no record coming out immediately, she felt that she “could finally leave socials without it devastating my income.”

A few months earlier, in New York, she’d said, “It’s funny. It’s like there’s no way around being an object, whether it’s an object of hate or an object that people want to possess and consume. What really just eats at my soul is that I’m actively being consumed as a person—it’s not just my music that’s being consumed.”

Mitski seems to perceive her life in terms of a conscious trade-off: she presents herself to the public so that she can make a living making music, which is what she lives for. And performing for a live audience, unlike all the other ways she has to offer herself up, feels right to her. She is most like herself when she’s onstage, doing shows. “They’re the best part of my days,” she told me recently over the phone, from the road. She had been keeping a show diary, in which she wrote down moments of her performance that she thought she could improve. At the same time, she had been reading essays by the theatre director Peter Brook and thinking about how the flow of a performance shouldn’t be sacrificed for the sake of perfecting every detail.

On the opening night of her tour, in Pittsburgh, she executed all the odd, precise moves that I’d seen her working on with Mirabile in Brooklyn. The audience sang along with her to nearly every track, even though her songs can be hard to sing. For most of the show, there was a firm fourth wall: Mitski did not address any remarks to the audience or introduce her band members. Toward the end of the evening, though, she spoke back to the crowd. She said, “I want you to know, and I mean this sincerely—I love you. It’s a selfish kind of love, because it’s about what you do for me. But thank you for connecting. Thank you for making me feel less alone.” ♦