Mr Little Jeans is Monica Birkenes, a singer from the Norwegian seaside town of Grimstad who studied drama in London and took her alias from a character in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. Her first single, “Rescue Song”, came out on Neon Gold in 2010, and her 2011 cover of Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” was what people first knew her for. By 2014 she was signed to Harvest Records and making her debut album in Los Angeles. On 18 February Harvest released “Good Mistake” as the title track of a four-song digital EP, filled out with the earlier singles “Runaway”, “Oh Sailor” and “The Suburbs”, five weeks before Pocketknife itself.
Like most of the album, it was made with the producer Tim Anderson, who recorded it at Werewolf Heart Records in Los Angeles, handled its programming and helped mix it. Apple’s credits list four writers: Birkenes, Anderson, Drew McFadden and Maize La Rue, with Birkenes and McFadden also credited as producers. Birkenes told NPR the song “was written from a perspective of having done my fair share of mistakes”, the biggest being situations she stayed in until something forced her out. She called it a reminder of what people are able to change.
Hypebeast, posting it the day after release, heard a “quirky” arrangement under a soothing vocal. When Pocketknife came out on 25 March, PopMatters’ Ryan Lathan called it a brilliant lo-fi dance track with “a pitch-black heart”, and quoted its lines about blowing out the candles on another year of the same mistakes. Consequence of Sound’s Randall Colburn named it one of the album’s three essential tracks. NPR premiered the video the same day. Ian Schwartz and Cooper Roberts conceived and directed it around a medicated trucker driving back through his past, and NPR’s Robin Hilton found the story hard to follow but full of regret.
YACHT remixed it that spring. Birkenes’s later records came out through Nettwerk, the F E V E R S EP in 2016 and the album Better Days in 2022, and in March 2024 she reissued Pocketknife herself as a 10th anniversary edition, the version Apple Music and Spotify now carry. On her Spotify page, “Good Mistake” sits first among her most-played songs, one place ahead of the Arcade Fire cover.
