After a whirlwind period between 2021 and 2022 that saw her catapulted to mainstream recognition with an acclaimed album (Jubilee) and a best-selling memoir (Crying In H Mart), Michelle Zauner, the woman behind indie pop project Japanese Breakfast, took a year away in South Korea, in order to reacquaint herself with her relatives there and the country’s culture. “It was a really special time,” the Korean-American musician tells tQ of the trip, which will form the basis of her next book. “I went to study the language for a year and document the process. It was a quieter life. I made some great friends and lived in the present. I spent time with family. I ate great food. It was a special part of my life.”
Before the relocation, Zauner had already written and recorded Japanese Breakfast’s new album, the delicate and elaborately produced For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), which came out last month. In contrast to the upbeat Jubilee, it’s sombre in tone. “I knew mostly going in that I wanted it to be very guitar-focused and that it was going to have a darker sound,” Zauner says. “I think I initially set out to make a creepy record, but the songs kind of all settled into being more eerie or melancholic. I think elements of the production lent themselves to that as well.”
Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Blake Mills, For Melancholy Brunettes centres on characters who flirt with temptation and desire, and who face the consequences of those actions in a manner akin to Icarus. “I was looking at my life and the people in it and thinking of stories,” says Zauner. “I think that’s what narrative is: characters who are on some sort of precipice or disrupting a balance in their life. So I think it was natural that those stories came up.” She dismisses the idea it might be linked to the life-changing twin successes of her memoir and Jubilee, however. “I don’t think that the majority of songs were really influenced by that shift in my life.”
One example of the record’s theme is ‘Orlando In Love,’ a track inspired by Italian Renaissance writer Matteo Maria Boiardo’s unfinished epic poem Orlando Innamorato, which Zauner says she learned about through a John Cheever book. Boiardo’s work, which consists of 68-and-half cantos, focuses on Orlando, a knight who falls in love with Angelica, a king’s daughter, while in Zauner’s song, the protagonist is a poet whose Winnebago is parked by the waters where he hears the call of a siren, “leaving him breathless and then drowned,” as the lyrics have it.
“There’s something both endearing and stupid about him so blindly following this sound,” Zauner says of the song. “When I started writing it, I was unsure of it at first and then it grew on me. I think it’s a really romantic song. And I fell in love with writing string arrangements over the past few years.”
Other highlights from the exquisite-sounding album, which also draws influence from European Romanticism, include ‘Honey Water,’ which centres on the complications within a relationship, ‘Mega Circuit’, a commentary on modern masculinity and young men grappling with their place in the world, and ‘Leda’, which came out of a reconciliation between Zauner and her father after a period of estrangement. Then there’s the lovely ballad ‘Men In Bars’, a duet between Zauner and actor Jeff Bridges.
“Blake and I spent a long time knowing that we had this feature to take advantage of and who could be the most fitting and unexpected singer,” Zauner says of Bridges’ guest appearance. “And it was many weeks of lobbing names back and forth at each other before we both agreed that that was the most interesting choice. He knew Jeff and played me a song of his called ‘Nothing Yet.’ He clearly is such a music fan and was very down to be a part of it. So it was so fun to get to have him on the record.”
Of the four Japanese Breakfast albums she has recorded so far, Zauner says For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) is her favourite. “I don’t know if I’ll feel that way in 10 years,” she says. “I think I always like the last record that I made. I certainly feel like it’s my strongest in terms of my songwriting, production and vocal performance.”
Japanese Breakfast’s new album For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) is out now via Dead Oceans. To begin reading Zauner’s Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below.
