Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner is done with joy — at least as a performance. On her boldest album yet, she reclaims sadness, subtlety, and being an artist with a “capital A.”
Since the release of Japanese Breakfast’s For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), Michelle Zauner has been tasked with translating and expounding on the meaning of the band’s fourth album—dissecting each track in interviews, explaining in detail how the stories came to be. Inspired by rare novels and even Renaissance poems, the album requires time to digest. “It’s a bit challenging, but it’s a record I am confident can be very deep and meaningful if people take the time with it,” she tells BUST.
When asked if she’s discovered anything new about herself or the album as each journalist pulls up a mirror to her magnum opus, she pauses. “That’s a great question. I’m struggling to find a good answer to it,” she says. “I think the two major things about this record are difficult or very private things that make it a little bit more [challenging] to talk about. One thing I’m realizing is that it’s a less clear-cut record. It’s about something very deep and complicated and big. It’s been hard to talk about.”
Unlike its predecessor—2021’s optimistic, bright, Grammy-nominated Jubilee–For Melancholy Brunettes is pensive, moody, and tumbling from states of visceral anxiety to poetic contemplations. The album was written in the period following two staggering successes in Zauner’s life: Jubilee pushed the band into mainstream success and her memoir, Crying in H Mart, where she navigates the loss of her mother, became a bestseller. From the outside, it seemed to be a shining moment for the songwriter, but in reality, she was “so scared during Jubilee.” “It was so ironic to have this huge album about joy, and it had such a joyous exterior and I was trembling,” she says. “I was trembling like a leaf the whole time. I was putting on such a happy face.”
On For Melancholy Brunettes, Zauner lets the jubilant mask fall off as she writes about the lure of temptation, desire, and the multifaceted manifestations of sadness.
The album’s title comes from a short story written by John Cheever in his book The World of Apples. In it, a man fantasizes about the women he wants to sleep with as an escape from his dreadful marriage, some of whom are “melancholy brunettes” and others that are “sad women.” Cheever’s book also inspired the lushly orchestrated album track “Orlando in Love,” where Zauner tells the story of a protagonist who falls in love with a siren and drowns. On “Mega Circuit,” she introduces listeners to a gang of incels as she writes about the depravity of modern masculinity. On “Little Girl,” she writes from the perspective of her father, singing “Dreaming of a daughter/ Who won’t speak to me,” as she narrates their strained relationship. Though many of the songs are written from the perspective of men, “Honey Water” outlines the sadness of a wife whose husband is pulled away by the “rapturous sweet temptation” of other women, and in “Winter in LA,” she croons sweetly, in Laurel Canyon–era delivery, over ’70s sonics, about wishing she was a “happier woman,” who loves the sun and California, instead of being housebound by sadness.
But the album also reflects another, less obvious theme, as Zauner tells BUST: “Realizing we have a very finite time on this earth, and there will be many unlived lives we have to come to terms with never living.”
Reading your recent interviews and the album bio, there seem to be countless ways to interpret the songs, and as many ways to dissect them.
It’s quite a difficult record for people to write about. It’s largely inspired by a lot of books that people haven’t read. Also, we’re coming out of an extreme pop-timist year, so having a record that’s a bit more subtle and can be quite somber at times is a bit challenging. But it’s a record I am confident is very deep and meaningful if people take the time with it.
You’ve talked about how with Jubilee you were touring and promoting your book at the same time and how that felt for you. What was it like emotionally to enter back into that space?
I actually feel really positive about it. [I’ve been] maybe overly protective of my mental and physical health. Maybe you can’t be overly protective of that…but ‘’ve made some conscious decisions about touring that I think have made it a very exciting thing for me to get back on the road with. And I’m surrounded by people that are great. I’m excited for the routine of touring and getting to open up mentally. So much of the last few months has been spent preparing for this. During Jubilee I recognized what a momentous time that was for me, and I was so afraid to fuck it up. It was very hard for me, that pressure. I was very nervous because I wanted to put on the best show and I wanted to feel like I deserved it. The shows are bigger [now] but it doesn’t feel like as big of a leap as it did going into Jubilee. I’m hoping to enjoy that place now and have fun and not get so in my head and beat myself up about mistakes.
Going back to the time before going into the studio for Melancholy Brunettes, what were you feeling and what was the writing process like?
My favorite part of this whole thing is writing songs. I’m someone who, when I know I have enough time to sit and get to do that, it’s very exciting for me. I tend to read a lot and absorb inspiration like a sponge. I was going to a lot of museums and watching a lot of films and jotting down a lot of notes. I spent most of 2023 and some of 2022 gathering inspiration and starting to write. I went upstate into different cabins to write different songs. I knew I wanted the songs to have a darker palette coming from Jubilee and I knew I wanted to have it be a guitar record because the Jubilee arrangements were so large and very focused around strings and horns. There wasn’t room for me as a guitar player, and I missed that.
Your previous albums were all recorded in DIY spaces. Why did you decide to record in a studio this time around?
It was always out of necessity financially to prioritize being in a space where you could take as much time as you wanted to explore an idea. But after the last three years touring Jubilee, we did a lot of sessions and I came to realize, You know, Electric Lady just sounds different than a semi-professionally finished warehouse [laughs]. There was one day where I did like 30 vocal takes on an SM7 and comped them together myself, and then went into a studio and recorded one vocal take on a really nice Neumann, a very expensive preamp. And the difference in fidelity is massive, it made me realize it was time. It was this ace up my sleeve that I’ve never made a studio record…it was going to sound different and better in some ways no matter what I did. It felt hard earned after over 20 years. I was 16 when I started making records; I’ve never made a studio album. I’m at that place in my career where I can afford it and also just feel not petrified by being in a place like that, not intimidated.
What made you want to make a guitar record and something that sounded more subtle at this point in your career?
Those were the songs that naturally came to me, and I thought they were beautiful and I thought about that making sense for a fourth album. I think of the difference between Homogenic and Vespertine—Homogenic being this really bombastic third Björk record and Vespertine being this very ethereal, nuanced record. I thought about Kid A, which is a real departure and challenge to Radiohead’s sound on their fourth record. It feels natural to me as an artist that your fourth album is the record where you get to really be a capital A artist.
Many of the songs on Melancholy Brunettes deal with this idea of temptation. I’m curious—for you, what’s your relationship with temptation?
In terms of my job it’s a complicated question to answer. Especially after my mom died, I put so much stock in my creative work anchoring me emotionally. And because I’ve always wanted this job I put all of myself and no boundary into it. So there is this temptation for the past few years to say yes to everything because that has gotten me where I am and I’m very happy with where I am. Maybe this past couple of years I realized, like, I need to put down boundaries otherwise I will die [laughs], like not playing six shows in a row for six weeks. It’s not doing every single interview, it’s not doing every single thing people want from me, but recognizing I’m a human being too and I need to protect certain parts of myself. A big thing that has been difficult for me because it’s not really something I wanna share, and I’m afraid that it’s going to take over the narrative, is my age. I’m in my 30s and I want to have a family. There is this temptation to push away having a family because I want so badly to keep doing creative work. It’s this anticipatory mourning of losing my identity as an artist if I were to become a mother. There’s this temptation to continue to push that part of my life away, and there’s also a temptation to run to that type of different life. I felt very caught between those two temptations and really melancholic about finding that balance…or that balance not quite existing…or melancholic [about the fact] that being a woman makes you have to decide what life you want. So much of what I mean by a melancholy record is this feeling of being torn between all of the parts of life you will never be able to interact with.
That’s what I mean by it’s a complicated record to talk about. Because a lot of the time in pop music, there are these big feelings. They’re about big breakups or big love lives or big fallouts. I think this record is about this very complicated, subtle feeling that’s been hard to put into words. For me personally, that was the temptation I was going through. A lot of the songs are also fictional examples of that. They’re about fathers who were tempted by a different life and abandoned their families. They’re about men who were tempted by relationships outside of their marriage. They’re about people who are tempted by their own solipsism and miss out on life as a result of it. There are people who are tempted by their jealousy to go to a bar and see who their girl has been flirting with to serve them the consequences. They’re all about people in different parts of their lives, and some of them are about me dealing with that as well. When I think about the tie that brings all those songs together, what I realized was that they’re all songs about people who have been tempted by something and make some mistake as a result of them being lured somewhere. In “Orlando,” too, it’s about a man who’s been tempted by a siren. It’s a very literal depiction of what I feel like all these characters are grappling with.
Thank you for saying that. I just turned 38, and it feels like in this industry it’s something forbidden to talk about and we have to say yes to lots of things to create the reality we want…but we don’t talk about unlived lives. You’ve shared so much of your life through your book and your songs, and you’ve also talked about finding more balance this time around. How do you balance being open with your art and protecting your private life?
It changes. What we just talked about was one of those things that I wanted to be very cautious of and not really bring up. It’s tough because sometimes the things you don’t wanna talk about, people can tell when something is missing or part of the narrative is incomplete without it. Especially when I was writing Crying in H Mart, I was very nervous about handling my relationship with my father. My editor was very quickly like, “It doesn’t make sense unless you explore this a little bit further.” Sometimes it’s the things that really scare you that are what people really want to hear about and are actually the taboo things that people need to hear about and stick with them. It’s an internal gauge that changes with time of what feels right and what feels wrong. Sometimes you trust certain people and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you trust the wrong people and they do you dirty. I go through phases, too, where I want to be really protective and cryptic, and sometimes I’m like, That’s not even who I am. All I really know is how to be honest; that’s what has served me all these years. So I go back and forth because being honest can be really exhausting.
Looking at For Melancholy Brunettes from a bird’s-eye view, how do you hope you’ll look back on this chapter in your life?
I hope this is the album where I get to enjoy the ride…I had a lot of stage fright that I never had before. Going through all of that and taking a year off, I get to enjoy it now. I wanna have a nice time and I hope I get to look back at this year as a fun time with a record I love, sharing it with people who are rooting for me.
Main Image Via Pak Bae
