Interview: Japanese Breakfast on new album 'For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)'.
"A lot of these songs, and songs I've written in the past, are sometimes from perspectives of people that I have a very difficult time understanding," shares Japanese Breakfast frontwoman Michelle Zauner about her songwriting process. "A lot of them are male perspectives that are possessive, or toxic, or horny. I think I really enjoy embodying people I have a hard time understanding as a way of connecting to them and feeling closer and trying to understand where they're coming from in some of their villainous behaviour."
To commemorate the release of her new album, 'For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)', Coup De Main hung out with Zauner in a haunted house (during the daytime, of course) to discuss her year off in Korea, navigating the world as a working artist, and if she's writing a second book...
Click here to order our limited-edition CDM x Japanese Breakfast zine (i.e. mini-magazine featuring photos / Q&A from this interview).
Michelle wears: Erik Charlotte dress, Maejean Vintage necklaces and rings, Vagabond shoes, Awe Inspired earrings.
Michelle wears: OGURA bonnet, Rodarte dress, Simone Rocha shoes, Reliquia necklace, Maejean Vintage rings.
COUP DE MAIN: When did you decide you wanted to take a year off and move to Korea?
JAPANESE BREAKFAST - MICHELLE ZAUNER: Honestly, after 'Crying In H Mart' it felt like a really natural follow-up to want to study the Korean language. And the more time that I was spending with my aunt, the more hungry I was to speak with her about my family and get closer to her before it's too late. And after 'Crying In H Mart' came out, my publisher was really receptive - they offered a second book contract and said that whatever I wanted to write about, that they would be happy to support it. And all I could think of was that I had been touring for three years and was feeling a little burnt out - it was a much needed year off and something I felt really passionate about.
CDM: Have you been working on that second book?
MICHELLE: I thought that I would work on it a little bit more while I was there, but learning the language took up pretty much my entire time there. I kept a journal for the year that I was there, and I wrote in it for just 10 minutes every day and amassed around 250,000 words. So just doing that every day and documenting what was going on, I think will be really helpful for me this year, when I start to kind of find the narrative arc and piece that together.
CDM: What was that year like for you?
MICHELLE: It was meaningful in ways that I couldn't have even anticipated. It was just so wonderful to do one thing with not much pressure... I mean, so much of what I do now is in front of so many people, and to just pursue something...
CDM: Is that pressure from other people or yourself?
MICHELLE: It's both! It's being so appreciative of the place that I've arrived at, and not wanting to lose it or bungle it or take it for granted. And that comes with a lot of mental self-sabotage, and it comes with a lot of self-doubt, and so it's wanting to do really well for the people who have put me here. That's an added pressure that you have just internally, so it was nice to kind of get away from that and sort of restart for a year and just do something really simple, like study one thing as an adult. To go back to school was a really fun experience. I made some lifelong friends. I got a lot closer to my aunt. I learned a lot more about myself and my culture and it was really beautiful.
Michelle wears: Piers Atkinson hat, Vintage top from Paumé Los Angeles, Vintage YSL pants from Paumé Los Angeles, Angela Scott shoes, Reliquia earrings.
CDM: You've said about writing 'Here Is Someone' on your new album that: "It was really hard for me to accept that I essentially achieved everything I ever wanted and still felt so tortured." Now that you've turned your feelings into song-form, do you still feel that way?
MICHELLE: I'm not sure. The last few years, I was under a lot of pressure, and didn't take it as well as I anticipated. I had a lot of stage fright, which I had never coped with before, and it was an intense time on me mentally and physically. So having time away really helped me heal and reset. I'm hoping I can just really enjoy playing music again and have fun with the set and the show. Just chill a little bit because it was an intense time for me when all of that was happening at once. So far we've played a few shows, but I've been feeling a lot more confident and comfortable and having fun with it again. So I'm looking forward to it, and hopefully it stays kind of in that mindset.
CDM: Do you think it's possible to feel absolutely fulfilled? Sometimes I talk to artists and they say it's frustrating for them when they feel like they're striving towards a goal, but as soon as they get there, they find the goal posts have moved.
MICHELLE: 100%. I remember having a very distinct memory where I was on tour with Mitski when we first started touring, and I saw her name on the banner at the Music Hall of Williamsburg and thought to myself, 'If I ever get to be at that level of an artist, then I will have made it.' And then a year later, when that happened, I remember thinking, 'All right, what's next? Where do we play next?' There's also an even dorkier reference, which is when you're playing-- have you played Stardew Valley by any chance? You strike me as someone who's maybe played Stardew Valley. That feeling of buying your first bag of turnip seeds is such a fun, exciting time, and then flashback to two years later and you're buying your final house upgrade and the feeling of satisfaction or achievement is just not... even though it's so much greater on paper, it doesn't feel the same as buying your first bag of turnip seeds. <laughs> That's kind of how it feels sometimes as a working artist... I still feel very, very lucky and very privileged. Some of the stuff that gets bigger, it's all relative, and some of it is kind of boring. Like playing SNL for the first time is never gonna happen again, but now we're getting bigger cases for our gear and stuff like that. <laughs> It comes with the territory of becoming a bigger artist, which is not particularly exciting, if that makes sense.
CDM: What do you value most about your life currently?
MICHELLE: My work and my person.
Michelle wears: Erik Charlotte dress, Lillian Shalom gloves, Jeffrey Campbell shoes, Reliquia necklace.
CDM: If you could easily change one thing about your life that's beyond your control, what would you choose to change?
MICHELLE: I wish I wasn't such a people pleaser. I'm not a people pleaser in the sense of my work at all, but my thing is, I'll really obstinately reject something that I am not interested in and then my people pleasing tendency will make me want to try to-- even if I say no, I'll try to make it work or doubt myself, and I wish I could just say no and move on. The other thing is that I really wish I could speak Korean fluently, and I wish I could spend more time there, but it's kind of tough with my work, and it was hard for me to leave there. But there's a whole life that kind of conflicts with me living there, so I wish that I could live those two lives simultaneously.
CDM: In an alternate reality, you're living your best life in Korea.
MICHELLE: I had a great life in Korea for a year and I can always go back, but it's kind of tough to do a bunch of other stuff that I really love and also be there.
CDM: Does 'Magic Mountain' still feel true to how you're currently feeling about your life?
MICHELLE: Yeah, I think that song is the most relevant to my life right now, in a big way. I feel like that song is my version of [Kate Bush's] 'This Woman’s Work'. I'm really excited and looking forward to motherhood and a new chapter in my life, but I'm hesitant to talk about it because I don't know if that's something that will happen for me physically. It's a difficult decision to be a woman who works and very much thinks of her creative work as a real anchor and obsession in my life. And what will that look like? Or what I will lose if I decide to have a family? There's some resentment towards my sex in that obligation, but there's also this desire to live a more balanced life and explore different pathways of existence, and that song is very much how I feel in my life right now, and felt very true to me when I wrote it, and probably will / hopefully will, for the rest of my life.
CDM: You've also said specifically about that song, that it was "about confronting the narcissism that goes into being an artist and deciding I didn't want it to destroy my potential for having a happy life." Do you think it's possible to be an artist and not indulge in any level of narcissism?
MICHELLE: No, I don't. You have to have a certain level of narcissism to believe that what you have to say about the human experience is worthwhile, so I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that I think is consuming and deserves observation. I don't think that self-interest is necessarily a bad thing, but yeah, I do think that it needs a bit of narcissism.
Michelle wears: Vintage Noir dress from Paumé Los Angeles, Vintage YSL hair bow from Paumé Los Angeles, SHUSHU/TONG shoes, Reliquia earrings and necklace, Maejean Vintage rings.
CDM: Why does 'Orlando In Love' feel like the thesis of this new album to you?
MICHELLE: In the process of writing the record, I began to realise that so many of these songs are episodic character studies of people succumbing to some sort of temptation, or being seduced into disrupting the balance in their lives. Orlando seemed like a very literal way of representing that. It's about a man who is kind of stupid, sort of foolish and romantic, and he writes cantos by the sea, and falls in love with a siren, and dies following her call. I think that all the songs, in some ways, are sort of about people following some kind of seductive call and ruining different parts of their lives or regretting that tipping of the scale. I was reading 'The Magic Mountain' by Thomas Mann at the time, and I think that the way that he treats Hans Castorp, that protagonist, was very much how I felt about creating Orlando. Orlando became sort of avatar for this album, both visually and thematically. I have always sort of felt like that was the thesis statement of the record, even though it was maybe not the most sensical first single in the sense that there's no repeating parts or big chorus, but I really felt like that set the mood of the album for me.
CDM: I really love the lyric, "They say only love can change a man but all that changes is me," in 'Honey Water'. What was running through your mind while writing that?
MICHELLE: We were talking about a man that we know that was kind of flailing in life, and my husband said, "only love can change a man," about him sort of turning a corner after meeting a woman. I thought that that was a really poetic thing to say, but I sort of took that context and applied it to a marriage in which one person is being unfaithful - and the woman, her sort of quiet rebellion, is to kind of emotionally and quietly disconnect from their partnership. And it was really interesting because I've worked with a couple of male producers that really didn't understand the line, "So it goes, I don't mind," and how passive it was during a really big moment in the song. I thought that was so funny that men have a really hard time understanding that kind of quiet rebellion, yet I've seen women do that so often in their lives.
CDM: I also love 'Picture Window' and the lyric, "All of my ghosts are real / All of my ghosts are my home." What inspired that song?
MICHELLE: That song is inspired by being someone that from a very young age has had many intrusive thoughts of my loved ones dying, and that has just gotten more intense into adulthood. For instance, if my husband is running an errand for twenty minutes longer than anticipated, or if I'm just watching him kind of linger on a balcony, or he hasn't responded to a text message, I just immediately assume that he's gotten into a car accident or was robbed at gunpoint. <laughs> That song is about being a very anxious person in a relationship, or loving someone so much that you are just in constant terror of their absence all the time. It's sometimes frustrating to be in a relationship with someone who has none of that at all, and also maybe a good thing ultimately, but when I was reflecting on that difference in our personalities, the chorus came to me because a lot of that also comes from seeing people that are very close to me die. I have very real ghosts in my life and so it makes sense that I have this real, deep seated fear of losing the people close to me because I have and my partner hasn't, or many people that I know haven't experienced that. And so that's what that chorus is about.
CDM: 'Winter In LA' is another great song, and I love that you think you and LA are not compatible - because same! I hate LA, so I'm interested to know why you also don't like it?
MICHELLE: I suffered a major depressive episode once when I was here for ten days by myself. I just feel pressured to feel a certain way when I'm here, and it just doesn't feel compatible with my personality. I know amazing people in LA, and obviously parts of LA are incredible, but I just have a tendency to get really depressed here, for some reason. I don't know why that is. Right now, I'm enjoying myself, but if I'm here for a while, that always seems to happen to me.
CDM: In 'Wuthering Heights', Emily Brontë wrote: "He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine." Which frame of mind do you relate to more?
MICHELLE: Heathcliff!
CDM: Why?
MICHELLE: I don't know. It's just my condition. I think that I am just a gloomier sort.
Michelle wears: Erik Charlotte hat, OGURA top and pants, Maile shoes, Lillian Shalom rings, Awe Inspired earrings, Vintage flower tie from Paumé Los Angeles.
CDM: Advice columnist Ann Landers once said: "Hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head." Is writing your way of building a new home for resentment (and other hard feelings) to live in - one that you can make a choice to visit if you want to, but is removed from your present?
MICHELLE: Yeah, I think so. Sometimes it helps me gain perspective and I do think it helps me to dissolve some of that resentment. Especially when I wrote my book, there was a version of the book pretty early on that was very, very resentful and very angry. One of the really great things about writing a book is that you have a lot of time built in away from it, that sort of offers you perspective and makes you realise how you sound talking about your life. I quickly realised that I was going to have to be more objective with the people that I was writing about if it was going to be fair. It really forced me to have more compassion for the people that I maybe resented before, and I find that I like to do that in music too. A lot of these songs, and songs I've written in the past, are sometimes from perspectives of people that I have a very difficult time understanding. A lot of them are male perspectives that are possessive, or toxic, or horny. I think I really enjoy embodying people I have a hard time understanding as a way of connecting to them and feeling closer and trying to understand where they're coming from in some of their villainous behaviour.
Coup De Main has collaborated with Japanese Breakfast on a limited-edition poster zine and sticker sheet - click here to order now!
Photos by: Ragan Henderson | Styling by: Lindsey Hartman
Hair by: Leticia Llesmin | Make-up by: Lochie Stonehouse
Polaroids by: Coup De Main
Japanese Breakfast's new album 'For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)' is out now.
Watch the 'Picture Window' video below...
