Mitski Shares English Cover Of “Bella Ciao”

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Earlier this year, Mitski covered Pete Seeger’s “Coyote, My Little Brother” for Spotify. Today, the indie sensation shared an acoustic, English language rendition of “Bella Ciao” and encouraged fans to post their versions of it as well.

“To get right to it, I tried something,” Mitski said in her YouTube video. She continued:

I tried making an English language version of this really important Italian song called “Bella Ciao.” Of course I don’t speak a lick of Italian so I used Google Translate shamelessly and I also took inspiration from Tom Waits and Marc Ribot’s English version of this song. But here’s the thing: Especially if you do speak Italian, unlike me, I’m sure you can write a better translation of this than I have. And if you’re one of those people, do it! Or try it! And record it, film it, share it. I wanna see it.

Or, if you’re a really impressive person and have another language in your repertoire, my goodness, do that. Do that language version of this song. I bet there are billions of ways you can translate and perform this song. But with that said, if you like the version I’m about to do, and you feel called to do that, but probably better, then I am going to post the lyrics that I did and I’m about to play A-Minor, D-Minor, E-Minor to begin with. You’ll see what I mean. I’m gonna transpose up as we go along. But anyway, I wanna see your version! Let’s all do a version of this song. I just wanna see what happens.

Watch the video below.