FEATURE: Spotlight: Japanese Breakfast

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Japanese Breakfast

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FOR this round of Spotlight…

I get to discuss one of my favourite artists right now. I have been following Japanese Breakfast for quite a while now. Japanese Breakfast is the solo musical project of the U.S. musician Michelle Zauner. Zauner has released two studio albums: Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017) - with a third, Jubilee, announced for release on 4th June. I am going to come to that album in a bit. Before anything musical, as Pitchfork recently wrote, Zauner’s (I shall refer to her by her real name just for this one article) memoir achieved a huge honour:

“Michelle Zauner, aka Japanese Breakfast, just released her memoir Crying in H Mart. Today it debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times’ Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller List. “NOW I’M JUST CRYING,” Zauner wrote on Twitter. The book was outsold in its category only by George W. Bush’s art book Out of Many, One. Zauner wrote: “God damn George Bush and his dumb ass paintings!!!!”

Zauner will discuss the book at a virtual talk for Harvard Book Store tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern with Alyse Whitney. “I will be very drunk and happy at this event tonight,” Zauner tweeted.

The new Japanese Breakfast album Jubilee is out June 4 via Dead Oceans. It features “Be Sweet” and “Posing in Bondage.” She recently announced a tour”.

I am really looking forward to Jubilee coming out, as I have heard Japanese Breakfast’s previous two albums and I really love what she is doing.

I am keen to bring in a Pitchfork profile of Japanese Breakfast from back in March. I am not going to put the whole feature in this one. There are a few interesting sections and observations that I wanted to mention:

“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.”

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.”

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”.

Before ending up and looking ahead to the release of Jubilee next month, I wanted to take a quick glance back at the previous Japanese Breakfast album, Soft Sounds from Another Planet. It is an album that ranked alongside the very best of 2017. If you have not heard that album then I would urge you to have a listen to it.

I want to quote one positive review of that album – just to give a sense of how critics reacted to Soft Sounds from Another Planet. This is what AllMusic had to offer in their extensive review:

The first Japanese Breakfast album Psychopomp was the best kind of bedroom pop record; fragile, intimate, and slightly weird. It drew from various indie pop tributaries and was built around Michelle Zauner's achingly pure vocals and her unique pop vision. On Soft Sounds from Another Planet, she and producer Craig Hendrix take the project out of the bedroom and aim for something larger. Much slicker and less wonky, the songs have a spacious, expansive sound that envelops the listener in warmth (even when the synths get a little chilly.) In less capable hands, the jump to a more professional sound could have been a disaster. Zauner and Hendrix don't sacrifice much of the idiosyncratic appeal of the first album; it still comes across as Zauner's vision and not a bid for indie chart success. She doesn't tamp down on the wild edges of her voice, she still writes very personal lyrics, and even when the songs veer toward the same '80s synth pop territory in which everyone else seems hellbent on staking a claim, the album doesn't lose its distinct charm. What the duo add to the mix is greater than anything that was lost in the transition; the walls of fuzzy guitars, the Spector-sized echo, the impact her voice makes now that it is clearly recorded. While there are songs on the previous album that had some real emotional impact, there was some odd stuff that failed to connect. Now everything hits like a knockout punch. Tracks like the guitar-heavy, almost shoegaze "Diving Woman," the soft focus, soft rock lament "Til Death," and the epic girl-group-in-space "Boyish" are wonderful combinations of lyrical insight, evocative arrangements, and stunning vocal performances that show Zauner can go big and still sound down to earth. The slick synth pop of "Machinist," the acoustic folk balladry of "This House," and the rock & roll waltz of the title track prove that Zauner has range, too. Soft Sounds from Another Planet is a giant leap forward for Japanese Breakfast; the move to a bigger sound results in a sure-handed modern pop record full of memorable songs, heart-wrenching vocals, and bottomless emotional depth.

With a lot of eyes on Japanese Breakfast at the moment, I feel that we are going to get a cracker of an album with Jubilee. I also feel this is an artist that we will be hearing a lot more from in years to come. I would recommend people pre-order Jubilee. This is what Rough Trade have to say:

“From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.

Jubilee finds Michelle Zauner embracing ambition and, with it, her boldest ideas and songs yet. Inspired by records like Bjork’s Homogenic, Zauner delivers bigness throughout - big ideas, big textures, colours, sounds and feelings. At a time when virtually everything feels extreme, Jubilee sets its sights on maximal joy, imagination, and exhilaration. It is, in Michelle Zauner’s words, “a record about fighting to feel. I wanted to re-experience the pure, unadulterated joy of creation...The songs are about recalling the optimism of youth and applying it to adulthood. They’re about making difficult choices, fighting ignominious impulses and honouring commitments, confronting the constant struggle we have with ourselves to be better people.”

Throughout Jubilee, Zauner pours her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution - these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it”.

I shall leave things there. The multi-talented Michelle Zauner is an artist that I have so much respect and time for. Keep your eyes out for her - and also listen to the work she has put out so far. In Japanese Breakfast, we have this extraordinary and rising artist who is going to be a big...