COVER STORY | Japanese Breakfast: A Quiet Life

“Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy,” John Cheever wrote in 1930, in his short story “Expelled.” “Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.” Cut to 95 years later, on a song called “Winter in LA,” the penultimate chapter of Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women): As Lauren Baba and Karl McComas-Reichl’s strings curl into her voice and Blake Mills’ jingle bells rattle into an airy, lingering pastoral, Michelle Zauner leans into the microphone. “I wish you had a happier woman,” she sings. “Someone who loves the sun, loves everyone.” Zauner did leave the house eventually, decamping to Seoul for a year before returning home to America in December 2024. She went to her motherland to write a book—her second, a sort-of follow-up to her 2021 memoir, Crying in H Mart, which spent 55 weeks on the New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list.

In 2021, Zauner capped off an ecstatic five-year run by making the then-most ambitious record of her career, Jubilee. It was undoubtedly terrific, stamped into excellence by singles “Be Sweet,” “Posing in Bondage” and “Savage Good Boy.” All of that felt improbable, considering how the second Japanese Breakfast album, Soft Sounds from Another Planet, is still not only the best album of 2017, but one of the best albums of this century, bar none. (Perhaps you were also crushed when the special-edition red cassette tape went out of print, or “This House” taught you a thing or two about the trouble of absence.) Jubilee landed on many year-end lists, including Paste’s, and even scored Zauner two Grammy nominations, for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album. She and her band were on top of the proverbial indie world but, after Jubilee sent her on a near-three-year global tour, Zauner began confronting burnout head-on. The pressure to write book #2 began setting in, too, but some of it was alleviated by her long-held interest in learning Korean, her mother’s native language. So, she took a sabbatical and flew over 6,000 miles east. “I think I wanted it so badly,” Zauner tells me. “I wanted to take a year off and just focus on something really simple and humble—just one thing, to live a quiet life.”

Zauner wrote Jubilee in response to making Crying in H Mart and in response to all of her songwriting around grief. It was a complete re-tooling of Japanese Breakfast, a name once ushered into existence at a time of life-altering trauma and flushed by it in perpetuity, as Zauner moved back to Eugene, Oregon in 2014 after her mother was diagnosed with cancer and made the urgent, high-tempo and heavy-handed Psychopomp. The band was a project abstracted and informed by loss, but Jubilee nurtured it into something shocking and bombastic and joyous. Zauner wrote “Kokomo, IN,” a swooning, string-arranged pop waltz, and she wrote “Slide Tackle,” a rich, horn-and-synth-layered, quasi-funk-rock elixir punched with a declaration: “I want to be good.” But Jubilee still ended in the inevitable, in an avalanche of noise rock rupturing through the conclusion of “Posing For Cars.” “I’m just the empty space inside the room,” Zauner sang, hinting at an eventual return to a darker place.

When she made Jubilee, Zauner stepped away from her guitar and became a frontwoman singer. “I didn’t feel super comfortable in that role, honestly,” she remembers. For For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), she started from scratch and returned to her primary instrument, writing interlocking guitar parts—chords that travel without a lot of repetition—and embracing the same kind of fingerpicking she performed when she fronted Little Big League 15 years ago. She began reaching for string arrangements like she would a synthesizer (the open, symphonic textures of “Boyish” spring to mind while listening to “Winter in LA” and “Orlando in Love”), and Mills put effects on fretless basses so they’d sound like flutes. “Baroque” might be an apt yet overused label for these songs, and it was a palette Zauner and Mills naturally came to together without pretense. Zauner reached for deep-sounding instruments, wanting to escape the fanfare of Jubilee. She wound up making an introspective record, one that summons the quieter tensions of Tusk and the ornamental gloom of Pet Sounds.

Dave Grohl once said that Sound City is the closest he’s ever gotten to recording in a perfect room. There’s history in that Van Nuys building, too, as Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Damn the Torpedoes and Nirvana’s Nevermind all came to life in the same room, spanning multiple decades. Though all four of her LPs are deliciously widescreen, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is the first Japanese Breakfast studio album. After years of flirting with the idea, Zauner was not only converted after cutting the demo for “Mega Circuit,” she finally understood why people record in studios. “It just sounds better,” she says. “It has a special energy, but there is also definitely a pressure that I don’t know if other musicians feel but I certainly still feel being in that kind of space—because it’s expensive and it’s very real and professional.” Mills and engineer Joseph Lorge, Zauner says, turned Sound City into the kind of space you occupy “with your friends, trying to make something cool.”

Her collaboration with Mills marks the first time Zauner has ever made music with a producer who never considered her opinion the highest priority, which is what she wanted. “I wanted someone that had their own vision for a record and would push and challenge me to go to a place that I hadn’t been before,” she says, taking a pause. “But, once I was there, I was like, ‘Ew, what is this?’” It was a tough but loving process, and she got to take advantage of Mills’ rolodex of session players, including the great Jim Keltner, the percussionist featured on tracks like “Jealous Guy,” “Dream Weaver” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” “When he came in with his little wristbands and sunglasses, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a real rock legend playing on my track,’” Zauner remembers. “Understanding the pocket that that kind of player has and feeling that for the first time—watching that happen and watching certain fills that I thought were just so off-kilter that they were mistakes, but being encouraged to live with them as pieces of character—was a really wild experience.”

Though she hopes it doesn’t become the Japanese Breakfast version of Lady Gaga’s “99 people in the room who don’t believe in you” quote, Zauner admits that making For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) was a strange experience, because working with Mills didn’t just push her out of her comfort zone, it shucked all of her music-making preconceptions clean off the bone. “He has so many guitars, and he really spends a lot of time finding the one that speaks to him for the core of the song, which I found to be really interesting.” Like Brian Wilson and Bobby Asher plucking piano strings with a bobby pin, Mills spent a long time putting binder clips on piano strings so the lead line in “Mega Circuit” would “rattle in a certain way.” “I kept being like, ‘When are we gonna get a drummer in here?’ Like, ‘The refrain is “I gotta write my baby a shuffle.” There’s gotta be a shuffle! How can I imagine what we should add to the song if I don’t have this core?’” Zauner says. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, but we already know that those things are going to be in it. We have to find what’s special about it first.’” She likens Mills’ process, which includes starting with all of the details first, to “watching someone paint a doorknob for the first month of building.” It sounds like patience played a huge part in finishing this album, I tell her. She agrees, before letting out a gut-busting laugh: “It was really hard!”

Though she never stopped noodling in the flavor of guitar music, Zauner became interested in making a “creepy album,” though she found it difficult to wed the two motifs. “It’s hard for me to find that kind of dissonance all the time that is pleasurable to me,” she explains. It became a broader album about melancholy but without abandoning the unease, which is how you get a song like “Mega Circuit,” which bursts with lines like “Sucked you off by the AC unit” and “Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded, carrying dull prayers of old men singing holier truths.” “There’s some kind of danger or consequence that awaits, or there’s a darkness underneath all of the songs that thread them together,” Zauner notes. While, tonally, the hauntedness of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) aligns closer with the hauntedness of Soft Sounds from Another Planet, she says this effort continues ideas that predate Japanese Breakfast, when she was in Little Big League and writing songs about “being afraid of men.”

Romanticism, the story of Icarus, irony and innuendo have all been interpreted over and over again in art, and I think that’s one of the most magical parts of this vocation we’re in. Nothing is ever out of style, so Zauner’s curiosity taking her to the seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” the splashes of loneliness in Degas’ “L’absinte” and the passions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is her way of reconstructing reference into modernity, like singing about kicking mud off ATVs in the fabulousness of a “blue light cast from a sodium beam,” or a locket bearing an X-ray during the “slipping hours left uncounted.” Lead single “Orlando in Love” felt like a thesis statement for her, which is why she used it to introduce the record in January. In Zauner’s hands, the song—a riff on Cheever’s riff on “Orlando Innamorato,” Matteo Maria Boiardo’s unfinished, 69-canto epic—becomes a lick about a Winnebago-bound, seaside poet falling at the knees of a siren singing his name “with all the sweetness of a mother.” It was her take on not just the melancholy of time passing, but the “mythological tales of men wanting too much and being punished for it, or abusing the power of the gods,” as well.

That idea—or, as she phrases it, “that threat”—turned into powerful bookends on For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), in “Here is Someone” and “Magic Mountain.” To Zauner, they are songs about permission, spawning from her fear of leaving her bandmates behind for a year. “I was very worried about their livelihoods and what they would do,” she says. “I felt it was selfish, but I also felt this real necessity to take time for myself. There’s this kind of hesitance, like, ‘Can you see a life where we leave this behind? Look at all of these things that this life is doing to us that’s quite hard.’” Briefly, on “Magic Mountain,” she embodies Hans Castorp yet considers motherhood while “playing king” with a lover mid-bed rest, outmuscling the stubbornness of dread with a thoughtful reflection of an older life—a life where she can set aside the narcissism of art-making and live happily while still reckoning with the sacrifice of time that comes with bringing another living thing into this world.

“Men in Bars” was born out of Zauner’s love for Kenny Rogers’ “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” near the end of the recording sessions. She liked the idea of a woman “who’s fed up in her relationship with a stoic, gruff, working-class war veteran that doesn’t pay her enough attention.” “And she makes a mistake and she goes and gets flirty at the bar,” she continues. “They recount the same memories that they have from different perspectives, and there’s a wordplay with ending up in the arms and bearing arms at men in bars. I really, really love it when there are songs that have men and women singing to each other in a duet, and there’s a real narrative. I don’t feel like it’s something we do enough.” Zauner knew for a long time that wanted to include a fun cameo in “Men in Bars,” because she’d never had a feature like that on a record before. She and Mills pitched ideas back and forth, but they could never agree on the guy. “We wanted him to have this deep voice that had a lot of character,” she says. “And then Blake was like, ‘What about Jeff Bridges?’ I was like, ‘The actor?’ And then he played me a track of his, and his voice was so beautiful.” Mills knew Bridges from their time working together on the actor-singer’s T Bone Burnett-produced, self-titled debut album. Within five minutes, Zauner was on FaceTime with them both, and they arranged for Bridges to record his part at his home, completing the indie-rockification of the Big Lebowski.

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is an album that sounds lost, and I mean that in a good way. I like hearing Zauner sing about doubt, fear and making mistakes in the aftermath of reaching indie rock’s land of plenty. I especially love the “all of my ghosts are real, all of my ghosts are my home” couplet from “Picture Window,” because there’s an earnestness in telling stories about people, relationships and feelings that are flawed yet needfully honest. “Whenever I feel some sort of pressure to deliver something, all I can really hold on to is what I find interesting, and what real things that I’m going through,” she says, admitting she never wanted the narrative of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) to be “success is difficult.” “No one finds that relatable. I had a very privileged and blessed three years, but there were also parts of it that were very, very hard on me—and that was definitely on my mind a lot. I’m at a place in my life where the things that occupy my mind are complex and not so shiny.”

There’s a line in Crying in H Mart that I still think about all the time, when Zauner wrote, “The world is divided into two types of people: those who have felt pain, and those who have yet to.” That image resurfaced in “Posing in Bondage” on Jubilee. I ask her if there’s a part of Crying in H Mart that’s meant to be felt again, three years later—if the hearts of each project ever meet. “I try not to talk about him too much,” she replies, “but there’s a scene in Crying in H Mart where I’m looking at my father having a hard time and I think the new record feels like that—it’s observing people with some sadness having a hard time, about our relationship and feeling some grief about it.”

Not only did her personal syllabus include country ballads and numerous European Romantic and Gothic titles, but Zauner began “dabbling a lot in the incel canon” in 2023, reading Infinite Jest and the works of Bret Easton Ellis while watching David Fincher’s filmography. “I don’t know why I was drawn to that content, but I think it was this desire for understanding of people who really frightened me,” she says. “The way that generation has been misled, I think it’s a very timely concern. Despite all this progress we’ve made as a culture, the role models that young men and the dangerous path they’re on and the hidden-in-plain-sight hatred, I was fascinated by it. It seems very dangerous and scary to me, as a woman in this world.” Zauner calls it the “gleaning period,” where she gets to “be a sponge” and jot down lines from books she finds compelling so she can invent stories of her own from them later on.

The 174 pages of Cheever’s The World of Apples became very fruitful for Zauner, especially “The Geometry of Love,” a short story about coping and denial, as a man in an unhappy, abusive marriage fantasizes about all the women he wishes to sleep with instead. The album’s title also represents the idea of wanting more than you have, especially in the company of an unkindness. Zauner thought Cheever’s inclusion of melancholy brunettes and sad women was silly and tongue-in-the-cheek despite her identifying with the “sulky, brooding girls” in the story. But Cheever’s writing soon hit close to home. “There are people in my life that I felt wanted too much and, instead of considering a balance or considering other people or how it might affect others, couldn’t help but be tempted to try to have it all and were dealing with the consequences of that,” she says. “And I felt like it was something I was struggling with in my own life, being so obsessed and losing out on memories with the people that I had left behind. Friends of mine were dying, I was missing large family weddings and all my band members were also having to miss those experiences in life.”

Zauner’s health was compromised, too. While touring Jubilee, she had a “really fucking violent relationship” with food for three years, suffering from a stomach condition that left her underweight and in unbearable pain before every gig—a cruel footnote to her time promoting Crying in H Mart, a book written about how food healed her and her family. You might remember Zauner’s lockdown-era TikTok explainer on how to make kimchi fried rice, or how the cover of Jubilee is washed with hanging persimmons. Food was the bridge between her and many of us, but it bizarrely became a villain and, while Zauner didn’t want it to become a narrative around her life, it proved difficult to ignore. “I was so freaked out, honestly, during the Jubilee cycle and the twin successes of my past two works, that I just couldn’t eat anything for three years and it was so sad.” Her persistent stomach aches began to subside once she got to Seoul.

Since her stay in Korea, Zauner has rebuilt her relationship with food. Initially, she didn’t want her face plastered on the cover of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) (“I love the idea of being on the cover but not on the cover”). But then, she saw paintings of women passed out in fits of melancholy and the pack-shot captured by Pak Bae was born. “I’m like this spoiled prince at a banquet of all these delicacies and I can eat no more,” Zauner declares. It was an image symbolic of the year she’d had, filled with lyrical Easter eggs baked into the various foods on the table before her: oysters, to represent “Orlando in Love”; honey water; a bowl of guts; the flowers in a vase from “Winter in LA”; and the Gordian knot from “Leda” kneaded into the top of a pie.

For the Japan-exclusive release of Jubilee, Zauner sang “Coffee Hanjan (커피한잔),” a ‘60s K-rock song by the Pearl Sisters and one of her mother’s and aunt’s favorites—a song the siblings would perform at their grandfather’s parties in matching rubber rain galoshes. Near the resolution of Crying in H Mart, Zauner and her husband, Peter Bradley, go to a karaoke bar in Seoul with her aunt and step-uncle. They swipe across a touchscreen tablet, choosing “Coffee Hanjan.” She hoped to sing it like her family had, at the noraebangs she accompanied them to as a child. “I chased after the Korean characters that seemed highlighted at the breakneck speed of a pinball,” Zauner wrote. “I let the lyrics fly from my mouth always just a little bit behind, hoping my mother tongue would guide me.” In front of an LED monitor, looking out at her family and other patrons, she sang, “You’re burning me up inside.”

I mention this because For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) begins in a place of fear, in a survey of what anxiety can churn the acid in your soul. “Here is Someone” is about “the toll that [being a touring musician] can have on you” and the sentimentalities we oft-hold for the parts of us we’ve left behind. In a medley of celeste, sarod, 12-string guitar, synths, gamelan, recorder, saxophone and mandolin, Zauner sings, “I run my guts back through the spoke again, measure by measure, in time with the songs we love.” It’s a non-linear malady, a passion experienced in two acts on separate halves of the world.

“Are you not afraid of every waking minute that your life could pass you by?” Zauner asks during “Picture Window.” Like her mother was for her, she has become our archive of flaw, fauna and finality, our observer with “unparalleled interest” and “inexhaustible devotion” who’s been painting the doorknobs that welcome us into all of her worlds. Like John Cheever, she writes to make sense of her life, and has since she first sang the words “fascinated by the infinite, finally goes” 12 years ago. Japanese Breakfast has always been an emotional vehicle—a white-knuckled, still-going tragedy about mortals, poets and lovers crossing paths with a sadness decorated in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it beauty. Zauner confronts the phenomena of living too hard in the exploding inevitable of sadness with fictitious, high-camp salience and, now, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is her in medias res, as we awaken with her mid-daydream, in-between the clasps of temptation, ghosts, ambition and blame, buried beside each other in reflection, in a sojourn of preservation and newness.

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is out March 21 via Dead Oceans. 

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.