Much to her surprise, Michelle Zauner turns a corner and enters a room full of vulvas on dinner plates. It’s a February afternoon and for the first time, the Japanese Breakfast bandleader is visiting Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, a sanctuary of second-wave feminist art that lives on the fourth floor of the Brooklyn Museum. As she makes her way around the massive installation, consisting of 39 place settings representing historical female figures, she points out the plates that she relates to the most. Among them is suffragist Susan B. Anthony’s three-dimensional dish, which swells up into coils like an octopus propelling itself.
Later, in the Egyptian wing, Zauner is a moth to the flame that is “Erotic Composition,” a sculpture of several limestone bodies engaged in an impressively flexible coital moment. As she circles the display case trying to follow which appendage ends where, her eyes—sparkling, embellished with little flicks of liner, framed by black hair wrapped into baby buns and a black surgical mask—flicker from bewilderment to awe to deference. “Very horny,” she concludes.
Being in public, let alone being in public surrounded by sexy religious art with a near-stranger, can be a bit overwhelming these days, but Zauner makes it invigorating. The 31-year-old is quick to lightly punch your shoulder to emphasize her enthusiasm for a point, or whip through moodboards for an upcoming music video on her phone in the same breath that she asks about your life. That rush of energy—of multiple thoughts tumbling out at once—seems to be her general state right now. On the heels of Crying in H Mart, her forthcoming memoir about loss, identity, and food, she will release Jubilee, her biggest- and brightest-sounding album yet, this June.
Zauner likes to stay busy—she’s also working on a video-game soundtrack—and she says the different projects help keep her mind at bay. Even small pandemic-era goals, like trying (and not quite succeeding) to re-read all of Jane Austen’s novels in a month, have provided her with a sense of purpose. A good day, she says, is a productive one. Maybe that’s because Zauner can’t shake the feeling that she has been handed a golden ticket—a supportive label home at renowned indie Dead Oceans, an eager audience that’s grown with each release, and now a major book deal. She knows she can never take it for granted.
“I have a shit-ton of GI cancer in my family—both my mom and her sister died really young—so I feel like I have a ticking time bomb inside of me,” she tells me over wine and pizza post-museum, her eyes fluttering rapidly as she speaks. “Once death was really close to me, I suddenly became very fearful of it. I think that lit a fire in me like, What do you have to say before it happens?”
Recorded in 2019 and initially slated for release last year, Jubilee was delayed again and again as the world stopped and then slowly came to terms with a new reality, one without touring. Zauner had imagined recruiting string and horn sections in every city, and for a long time, she couldn’t bear to sacrifice this dramatic vision for grainy, acoustic live-stream performances. She’d spent the previous few years studying music theory and piano. Encouraged by her bandmate and co-producer Craig Hendrix, she helped compose the string and horn arrangements for the first time.
Japanese Breakfast has always been good at simultaneous forms of musical homage, and Jubilee is reminiscent of multiple eras of indie touchstones: the regal arrangements of mid-’oos indie-folk groups; the dreamy chillwave of Wild Nothing, who co-wrote the first single, “Be Sweet”; a touch of pop extravagance à la Kate Bush, one of Zauner’s main influences; the extended, windswept indie-guitar-hero moment we’ve come to expect in the genre, that feels somehow indebted to Nels Cline. Through it all, she emanates an outward electricity and deep interiority. The dazzling opening number, “Paprika,” signals a new age, bursting open like the ripest of fruits. “How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers/To captivate every heart? Projecting your visions to strangers who feel it, who listen, who linger on every word,” she wonders on the song, before proclaiming what that sensation feels like: “Oh, it’s a rush!”
Neither of the first two Japanese Breakfast albums, 2016’s Psychopomp and 2017’s Soft Sounds From Another Planet, aspired to quite these heights. Written in the wake of her mother’s death in 2014, both records sound insular compared to Jubilee. On the new album’s cover, Zauner sits in a cloud-like, duckling-colored gown surrounded by dangling persimmons, symbols of bitter fruit maturing into something sweet.
“Soft Sounds was about disassociating to preserve my mental health,” she explains. “After writing two albums and a book about grief, I feel very ready to embrace feeling.” She points to songs like “Kokomo, IN,” which finds a midwestern teenage boy “passing time just popping wheelies” as he waits for his young lover’s return, or the wistfully funky “Slide Tackle,” which imagines physically forcing mental darkness into submission. “I wanted to just explore a different part of me: I am capable of joy and I have experienced a lot of joy,” she says. “All the songs are different reminders of how to experience or carve out space for that.”
According to Zauner’s childhood stories, she has long reveled in a bit of playful mischief: an independent only child who led her fellow grade-school ballerinas in mini-rebellions and got held back in the process. “I was always being told to calm down, to chill out, to slow down. I was a bad toddler, I was a bad child, I was a bad teenager,” she recalls. “I felt too big for my environment. I just had this energy of like, ‘I want to do what I want to do.’”
She lived in Seoul for her first year of life, until her parents relocated to Eugene, Oregon, which she describes as “a hippie town where everyone wears Birkenstocks and makes nut butter.” The Pacific Northwest was in the midst of yet another indie rock boom during Zauner’s childhood in the ’90s, and by her teenage years, she was a devout fan of artists like Modest Mouse, Joanna Newsom, and Mount Eerie. (Among her many tattoos is a drawing from Phil Elverum’s book Dawn, depicting the eternal struggle of social anxiety vs. loneliness.) She also discovered the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, whose onstage theatrics and Korean-American heritage hugely inspired her. “The art that resonates with me the most is someone who feels so much just putting it all on display,” she says.
Under the name Little Girl, Big Spoon, a teenaged Zauner played her songs at school benefits, open-mic nights, and, eventually, legitimate venues around Eugene. In Crying in H Mart’s accounts of these early performances, she never once mentions being nervous, and she has no memories of shaky legs or forgetting the words to her sensitive songs. When I point this out, it’s almost as if the impulse to be frightened in front of a crowd has never registered to her. She explains that nerves are not really in her nature, before calling herself a lifelong “disruptive clown—I just loved to be the center of attention and make people laugh.”
Though music was a bright spot, Zauner experienced what she calls a depression-induced mental breakdown towards the end of high school, compounded by an increasingly controlling relationship with her mother. She soon decamped across the country to Bryn Mawr, a women’s college outside of Philadelphia. She pursued an independent major in creative writing and film studies, and played in an indie-pop band called Post Post. As Zauner found her footing as a young adult, she hoped that time and space would repair the wounds with her mother.
After graduation in 2011, Zauner moved to Philadelphia proper and started an indie/emo band named Little Big League. Alongside a handful of roommates, she lived in a crappy apartment stuffed with ad hoc furniture and worked various odd jobs to scrounge together enough money to go on tour. While the quartet found a small audience and some critical attention (“We got some track reviews on Pitchfork,” she wryly notes), Little Big League’s prospects were dimming after two records. Japanese Breakfast thus began as an intimate solo project, with barebones tapes like 2013’s June and 2014’s American Sound. Zauner often returned to these early sketches, breathing new life into the bones of old songs. Within a few years, Japanese Breakfast would grow to encompass the musicians around her.
In the spring of 2014, after learning that a cancerous tumor was growing in her mom’s stomach, Zauner moved back to Eugene. She helped her 56-year-old mother through chemotherapy for stage IV pancreatic cancer, learning how to cook easily-digestible Korean staples and carefully counting every calorie consumed. The ensuing months were a devastating blur of “chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone,” she writes in Crying in H Mart—and then a brief bright spot. Zauner married Peter Bradley, her boyfriend of a year and a half, in the fall of 2014. Marriage was not a milestone that she had previously spent much time considering, but she knew the prospect of planning her wedding might help her mom hang on a little longer. “It felt like we’d thrown open a shade and the room was filled with new light,” she writes. Her mother passed away just two weeks after the wedding.
In the ensuing months, Zauner felt like she needed to flip a switch on her life. “I was 25 and my mom had just died, it was time for me to get a job,” she says. “I tried to be a musician for seven years and I’d given it my all, but no one was really interested or it wasn’t enough.” So, with her new husband by her side, she moved to Brooklyn and got a job at an advertising company that sold mural space. In her free time, she put the finishing touches on a collection of dream-pop songs she recorded in the fragile, disorienting days after her mother’s death. She called it Psychopomp, after the mythological beings that escort the deceased to the afterlife.
Loss is a constant presence on the album, from the cover photo of Zauner’s mom and an old friend to songs like “In Heaven,” which grapples with a conflicted desire to believe in something beyond our earthly existence. Grief became the theme of nearly every interview during the initial rise of Japanese Breakfast. Zauner didn’t mind that much, she says; sharing her story felt weirdly therapeutic, and besides, she’s a self-proclaimed open book, sometimes to a fault. The enduring image from the Psychopomp era can be found in the video for “Everybody Wants to Love You,” in which Zauner shotguns a beer, rides a motorcycle, and rips a guitar solo atop a semi-truck, all while wearing her late mother’s hanbok.
One year later, Japanese Breakfast shared Soft Sounds From Another Planet. Again, the record explored trauma and detachment, this time through the loose concept of space and science fiction. While Zauner had been intimately involved in conceptualizing and directing the videos around Psychopomp, Soft Sounds’ elaborate visuals—which involve demons, rocket fuel-infused hallucinations, and cinematic school dances—also marked the moment Zauner came into her own as a music video director. She has since helmed kooky clips for Better Oblivion Community Center and Charly Bliss, adding to an ever-growing resumé.
From 2016 to 2018, as Japanese Breakfast flourished, good things were also happening for Zauner on the writing front. A piece she wrote about reconnecting with her late mother by learning to cook traditional Korean meals won Glamour’s 2016 essay contest. Afterwards, she was approached by several literary agents, bolstering her belief that there was more story to tell, maybe even a book. Two years later, the first chapter of this budding memoir appeared as an essay in The New Yorker. “Crying in H Mart” looks beyond Zauner’s personal bubble of grief and considers identity through the experience of shopping at the Korean-American supermarket chain. In aisles stocked with ingredients deemed “ethnic” by American grocery stores, and in the food court filled with jjigae and tteokbokki stalls, “We are all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves,” she writes. “We look for a taste of it in the food we order and the ingredients we buy. Then we separate.”
Zauner has long harbored writerly ambitions, but she always figured that if she pursued a writing career, it would be in journalism. “I took every single creative writing course that was offered in college except for nonfiction,” she says. “I never felt like I could write about my own experiences because I would have to preface it with my identity and race. I couldn’t just be this neutral body. Suddenly, there was an urgency to tell this story largely as a way to figure out what I was feeling.” Writing from dressing rooms, tour vans, and an extended stay in Korea, Zauner excavated lost memories, like the way her mother lovingly broke in a pair of stiff leather cowboy boots before mailing them to her at college.
Looking back now, Zauner’s workaholic tendencies intensified following her mother’s death. She suspects that she was unconsciously leaning into the version of herself that her mom had always encouraged. But on a more immediate level, she needed to throw herself into work to not fall “into a very dark place, one I wouldn’t be able to get out of.”
The side projects during the four years since Soft Sounds have spanned wide. Zauner’s been writing the soundtrack to Sable, an upcoming open-world video game about a young girl’s rite-of-passage quest, for the past three years; she describes her contributions as “sprawling, ambient-chill tracks.” Last September, she released an EP of pop songs with Crying’s Ryan Galloway, under the name BUMPER. She even dabbled in television, hosting her own Vice food series and appearing in an episode of the absurdist sitcom Search Party, in which she plays a wedding guitarist cursed to perform Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” for a comically long time. “She’s always had a clear vision of what she wants,” says longtime friend Adam Kolodny, who’s worked with Zauner on every Japanese Breakfast video. “Michelle will eventually direct a feature film.”
Given her many projects, I can’t help but ask if she has any boundary between her work and the rest of her life, especially since her husband plays guitar in Japanese Breakfast. “There is no boundary—I don’t know what that looks like,” she says with a laugh. “I know this is a dangerous thing to say, but my entire life is my work. I always want to be thinking about or contributing to my work. Even if I watch a movie, it has to influence my work in some way.” She pauses to groan at herself; she knows this sounds a bit extreme. “I mean, it’s sickening.”
When she puts it another way, later on, her ambition looks a bit different, maybe even admirable. “I always want to be learning, I always want to be better,” she says. “I never want to rest on any laurels.”
A few weeks after our museum date, Zauner and I reconnect via video chat. After spending more time with Jubilee, I wanted to delve into the darker moments on the record. One of its most devastating songs is “In Hell,” which originated as a Soft Sounds bonus track. “For an album about joy, that song is the saddest song I have ever written,” Zauner says. “It’s about putting my dog down and thinking, Why couldn’t we just have this option when my mom was dying? In movies, when someone dies, they just close their eyes one day and they’re gone. But it’s literally weeks of someone in a coma, pissing the bed and changing it. I had to make the call to give my dog the shots in the same way we’d have to give my mom the hydrocodone. Comparing those two things was really heavy.”
“Tactics,” a ballad about walking away from a toxic relationship, pulls from Zauner’s experiences with her estranged father, who now lives in Thailand. (Zauner says she mailed him a copy of Crying in H Mart, but the two have not really spoken in a year.) The characters on Jubilee are complicated and rich, sometimes literally. On “Savage Good Boy,” a gnarly highlight co-produced with fellow Philly scene veteran Alex G, she steps into the shoes of a billionaire who’s hoarding wealth for the end of the world. Zauner is fascinated by how people rationalize their own immense selfishness by using the cover of personal survival. “I don’t know if anyone really thinks they’re evil,” she says. “If I can see part of myself in a villain, that’s what haunts me and makes me think of them as a real person, so I wanted to write from that perspective.”
Conceptually, Zauner felt a certain pressure to go big. “I was thinking about what musicians with long careers do with their third albums,” she says, pointing to Björk’s Homogenic and Wilco’s Summerteeth. “I would like to believe that things really start to get figured out by then, that it should sound really confident.” When I remark that this is her first third album—her previous bands never made it that far—Zauner remembers something. She picks up her laptop and carries me from her bedroom into the living room of her Bushwick apartment, a bright yellow room filled with books, family photos, and show posters. She turns the screen to reveal a series of framed Little Big League and Japanese Breakfast records in a neat chronological row. Jubilee vinyl has just arrived, and Zauner finally fills the long-empty spot on the wall.
