Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner embraces melancholy in new album

The music of the indie rock band Japanese Breakfast is suffused with longing. In songs from the group’s first LP, 2016’s Psychopomp, author, musician and singer Michelle Zauner longs for her mother, who died of cancer more than a decade ago.

The 35-year-old Zauner explores other kinds of longing on the band’s latest album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). The lyrics tell stories of figures who yearn — some who get what they want, and others who do and wish 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.

Like the characters in her songs, Zauner has struggled to find balance 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.”

With the new album finished and coming out today, Zauner says she is adjusting her priorities between all the things she yearns for: her career goals, a connection to family and a connection to her ancestral home 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 last year living in Seoul, South Korea, and though part of her wanted to stay, she couldn’t give up her life in the United States.

“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.”

While some songs in the new album depict fictional characters dealing with conflicting desires, others are inspired by people in Zauner’s own life.

In the song “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 published in Harper’s Bazaar, Zauner wrote that her father moved to Thailand and began dating much younger women less than a year after her mother’s death.

“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.

Eventually, Zauner and her father stopped speaking.

In the years after her mother’s death, Zauner dealt with her grief by writing music, as well as publishing the New York Times bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart. The book chronicles Zauner’s efforts to hold onto her Korean heritage while her mother was dying.

After it was published, The New York Times reached her father for comment. 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 needed to reach out. A song from the new album, “Leda,” is about that moment of reconciliation.

“Tell me everything”
“Everybody’s fine”
I can tell you’re drunk
Wandering somewhere 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 web by Majd Al-Waheidi.