Washing Machine Heart

"Washing Machine Heart" is track 12 of Be the Cowboy, 2:08, written by Mitski and produced by Patrick Hyland; it was not a single. She told The 405 in 2018 that it is about your heart beating so loud that it's going dun dun dun, like there's a shoe in it, and, asked about the washing-machine imagery, that there can be more than one meaning; she told BBC 6 Music she tried to capture a pounding heart through shoes banging in a washing machine. Hyland said, per Wikipedia, that it was originally not going to be on the album, and the do-mi-ti lyric was, per Mitski, a failed attempt to fit in miso soup. AllMusic's Marcy Donelson tied the stomping bleepy sound to the appliance, and The A.V. Club's Katie Rife called it a deranged domestic ballad with a pleasantly disorienting beat.

It is certified platinum in New Zealand, the UK and the US. The black-and-white video was directed by Zia Anger, who also directed "Geyser", and released around November 1, 2018 as a Tidal exclusive; Mitski lit and styled it like a femme fatale from an old noir film. Setlist.fm counts 271 performances, her seventh most played; at the Warfield in San Francisco in 2018 the choreography included swishing hands like a washing machine. She played it at Glastonbury in 2022. No covers or samples were found, and the upload is presumably the album version.