Japanese Breakfast's Magical Gap Year

Michelle Zauner was ready to freak people out a little. “I initially wanted to make a creepy album,” she tells me, reflecting on the genesis of her band Japanese Breakfast’s new release, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). After finishing a couple of songs with “dissonant chords and eerie progressions,” however, the frontwoman and songwriter found she simply couldn’t conjure enough creep. Which is not to say that Melancholy Brunettes isn’t, in its own way, a spine-tingler.

Japanese Breakfast’s last album, 2021’s Jubilee, was a big euphoric joyride, an indie-pop juggernaut rife with hooks and singalong choruses that catapulted the band to fame and garnered two Grammy nods. Its enthusiastic reception — and the sought-after two-year-long tour that followed — coincided with Zauner’s surprise breakout as a literary star. Her debut memoir, Crying in H Mart, an elegy to her late mother presented through the prism of food, spent 67 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and established her not only as a girlcrush standard-bearer for first-generation Korean American millennials but also something of a culinary guru (who wouldn’t want her recipe for kimchi stew?). Melancholy Brunettes is a major vibe shift.

“After seeing the band and my career get so much bigger, I found myself wanting to make something more intimate,” she says. “Jubilee was very colorful, and I was seeking a different sonic and visual palette. It’s a bit more of a slow burn.”

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) showcases Zauner’s languid, crystalline guitarwork rather than the complex arrangements of Jubilee, and even though it’s the first Japanese Breakfast album to be recorded in a proper studio, its DNA as a record written in a secluded cabin in upstate New York is evident in its hushed, ruminative beauty. The (wonderful, winky) title is taken from a John Cheever story in which the unhappily married narrator fantasizes about the types of women he would like to sleep with, and literary and mythological references are strewn throughout the songs like Easter eggs. In other words, if you’re looking for a record to obsess over, dissect, and basically dissolve into, you’ve found it.

When we talk over Zoom, Zauner is at home in Los Angeles, sitting at a table next to an enormous print of a pink blooming peony. Her husband and bandmate, Peter Bradley, occasionally wanders through a room behind her. She’s wearing a black button-down shirt that matches her blunt-cut jet hair and the tattoos that flash on her knuckles. She appears deceptively young: At 36, she could easily be mistaken for 22. She’s been writing music since she was a teenager, when she played open mic nights around her hometown of Eugene, Oregon, despite the disapproval of her parents. During and after college at Bryn Mawr, she cycled through two bands, Post Post and Little Big League, respectively, before beginning to record as Japanese Breakfast (which she named after a GIF that she saw on Tumblr) in 2013. When her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2014, Zauner returned to Oregon to care for her and put everything on hold. The songs that she wrote to process her grief became the first Japanese Breakfast album, Psychopomp, released to critical acclaim in 2016.

“I was always turning down hanging out with friends because I would rather play a show or do some project.”

Like many highly productive, creatively ambidextrous people, Zauner has an uncanny ability to shapeshift. In the video for “Orlando in Love,” the first single from Melancholy Brunettes, she appears as the titular Orlando, trussed up in vintage maritime finery, being seduced by a siren emerging from a seashell. In the video for “Mega Circuit,” the second single, she and her friends are off-roading through a forest on an ATV, firing rifles and beating a mannequin head with a stick. “Orlando” plays out like a shimmering short film; “Mega Circuit” is handheld, jumpy and grubby. Zauner directed both. Her ability to deftly flick between genres and moods, which has played out over the arc of Japanese Breakfast’s previous three albums, is part of her genius. Like fellow Pacific Northwesterner Carrie Brownstein, you get the impression she could do anything well.

There’s a downside to being superhumanly tenacious and hard-working, though, and the attainment of longed-for success can have unforeseen ramifications. This is a thread that runs throughout Melancholy Brunettes: Beware the perils of desire. “After my mom died, I became a bit of a workaholic,” Zauner says. “I found great support and comfort in working very intensely and being celebrated for it. That was all I held on to for a long time. It was what I wanted, and it was anchoring, but I also found myself kind of getting lost in it. And I realized somewhere in the Jubilee cycle that it had gone too far. I was always turning down hanging out with friends because I would rather play a show or do some kind of project. I missed weddings and saying goodbye to friends who passed away while I was on the road.” She adds: “I was fascinated by how much of life is about balance and how quickly you can lose yourself to something — and what’s at stake when you do.”

“I had so much stress fixated in my stomach. Going to Korea healed my gut.”

The album is populated by desperate wives and emotionally absent fathers, disenfranchised incel teens and doomed lovers. There’s even a murder ballad with Jeff Bridges (yes, that Jeff Bridges) in which Zauner’s sweet-as-candy voice is offset by his gruff croon as they harmonize through a tale about the consequences of infidelity (“But who could say that I’m to blame for wandering?/ I never knew I’d find my way into the arms of men in bars”). The song “Magic Mountain” references a Thomas Mann novel of the same name, in which the protagonist decamps to a Swiss sanatorium, while the track “Here Is Someone,” Zauner says, reflects questions she was asking about her own health.

“It’s basically about me being afraid to ask the band for a year off,” she says. “I was envisioning a world where we live a slower life for a while, and wondering if that would be OK or if they would feel betrayed.” Turns out, they were cool with it, so as soon as recording wrapped in December 2023, Zauner decamped to Seoul, where she’d spent summers visiting her grandmother as a child, for the next 12 months.

Ostensibly, she says, she went to beef up on her Korean language skills and write her next book, but it turned out to be much more than that. She took classes, hung out with indie musician buddies and K-pop stars, and reconnected with her heritage in ways she never expected to. “I would say in terms of emotional meaningfulness, it went above and beyond,” she says. “I thought that I was going to be really bored and have a hard and lonely time there. But I made some amazing lifelong friends, and I was able to get closer to my family there. I found pieces of myself that I never knew I would.”

She also, once again, found her way to clarity and wholeness through food. “I had been in so much pain for those years touring Jubilee because I had so much stress kind of fixated in my stomach,” she says. “Going to Korea healed my gut. It was crazy. Honestly, I think I just needed time off, but eating food that my mom had made for me when I was growing up made it physically and mentally a tremendous time of healing for me.”

As for her next book? Well, it didn’t get written. But the newly enlightened Zauner isn’t sweating it. “I spent, like, eight hours a day learning Korean, and then I wrote in my diary for 10 minutes every night and amassed 250,000 words of material. When I have breaks from touring or whatever this year, I’ll reread everything and glean what’s good and find a narrative arc. Weirdly, I don’t feel that pressured.” Fans salivating for another hit of her poignant prose will have to wait, just as they will for the much-talked about film adaptation of Crying in H Mart, which is currently on hold. But with Zauner, there’s never any question about whether or not something will come to fruition sooner or later.

“I’m looking down the barrel of maybe 10 more years doing Japanese Breakfast.”

“I’m looking down the barrel of maybe 10 more years doing Japanese Breakfast. I want to marry my interests and do more writing, more directing. And I’m in my mid-30s and have to start thinking about if I want a family and how would I ever have that as a working creative woman,” she says candidly. (Of course, only women have to ask these questions.)

“Being an artist is such a narcissistic endeavor, and I’m constantly in the shadow of the next creative mountain I feel I have to scale. But I’m ready to get comfortable with just doing the work and taking what comes,” she continues, smiling. “I feel at peace with the idea that if this is all it ever is, I’ve done pretty good.”

Top image credits: Nina Ricci clothing, Falke tights