“When people grieve or go through a great loss, there are just ugly parts that come out of people when they’re in survival mode,” Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner advised NPR, reflecting on the difficult relationships behind her new album.
Pak Bae
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Pak Bae
The music of the indie rock band Japanese Breakfast is suffused with longing. In songs from the group’s first LP, 2016’s Psychopomp, writer, musician and singer Michelle Zauner longs for her mom, who died of most cancers greater than a decade in the past.
The 35-year-old Zauner explores different kinds of longing on the band’s newest album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& unhappy girls). The lyrics inform tales of figures who yearn — some who get what they need, and others who do and want they hadn’t.
“All of these characters succumb to some sort of temptation or disrupt a balance in their lives and are then grappling with the consequences or regrets of that decision-making,” says Zauner.
Just like the characters in her songs, Zauner has struggled to search out steadiness in her life.
“For me, in this record, I was thinking a lot about how much my work life had really consumed me over the past several years,” she says. “And I think at the end of the Jubilee cycle [the period in which she was promoting her 2021 album], I was really reckoning with how I had kind of disrupted a balance in my life and needed to kind of get back on track to live a happier life.”
Michelle Zauner performs on day three of the Austin Metropolis Limits Music Pageant’s first weekend at Zilker Park on Sunday, Oct. 9, 2022, in Austin, Texas.
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With the brand new album completed and popping out at present, Zauner says she is adjusting her priorities between all of the issues she yearns for: her profession targets, a connection to household and a connection to her ancestral dwelling of Korea.
“I think especially after my mother passed away, I’ve felt like I’ve just been running through life trying to do everything I can because I’m so much more aware of how short it is,” she says.
She spent final 12 months residing in Seoul, South Korea, and although a part of her wished to remain, she could not quit her life in america.
“There’s a kind of melancholy in looking out at these unlived lives,” Zauner says. “But it’s not a violent longing, it’s just kind of a melancholic acceptance.”
Whereas some songs within the new album depict fictional characters coping with conflicting needs, others are impressed by folks in Zauner’s personal life.
Within the track “Little Girl,” she sings: “Dreaming of a daughter who won’t speak to me / Running for her father, coming home.”
“It is from the point of view of a father who regrets the decisions he’s made that’s led to an estrangement with his daughter,” Zauner says. “And I think that, for personal reasons, there was some interest in that perspective.”
In a 2021 essay printed in Harper’s Bazaar, Zauner wrote that her father moved to Thailand and commenced relationship a lot youthful girls lower than a 12 months after her mom’s dying.
“When people grieve or go through a great loss, there are just ugly parts that come out of people when they’re in survival mode,” Zauner says.
Ultimately, Zauner and her father stopped talking.
Within the years after her mom’s dying, Zauner dealt together with her grief by writing music, in addition to publishing the New York Instances bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart. The e book chronicles Zauner’s efforts to carry onto her Korean heritage whereas her mom was dying.
After it was printed, The New York Instances reached her father for remark. He was dismayed by how his daughter portrayed him.
“That was sort of the first time I read about his feelings about the book, and that was really shocking and difficult for me,” Zauner says. She realized she wanted to succeed in out. A track from the brand new album, “Leda,” is about that second of reconciliation.
“Tell me everything”
“Everybody’s fine”
I can let you know’re drunk
Wandering someplace Cretian
“I had just called him and I thought it was kind of sweet to discover that he was sort of tipsy in Crete and answered the phone ‘Tell me everything,'” she says.
“Even though your relationship with your family can become quite complicated and painful, many years can pass and you can say something so casual like ‘Tell me everything.’ It was actually a really sweet bonding moment between my father and I.”
Edited for radio by Phil Harrell and for the online by Majd Al-Waheidi.
