Here Is Someone

On the eve of a new Japanese Breakfast album, a look back at everything that came before.

Mar 21, 2025

Welcome to Something New, a newsletter about the human curation of movies, music, books, games, and everything else worthwhile.

I’ll immediately link to the partner playlist for the project: The Zauner Tapes

This piece is also littered with embedded songs — some of which are on the aforementioned playlist, some are not. Listen along, if you’d like, or explore the embedded songs as they are presented. Either way, I recommend letting the music play in chronological order, for its full effect.

Introduction

Tonight is For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Girls) eve, the night before the release of singer/songwriter Micelle Zauner’s — stage name Japanese Breakfast — fourth studio album.

Michelle, a Seoul, Korea-born, Eugene, Oregon-raised kid, had a Korean mother — Chongmi — and an American father — Joel. They weren’t musicians, and they didn’t listen too much — dad did have some CD’s in the car, like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors. Michelle convinced them to get her a guitar when she was 15 years old. It was the tool that would allow her to become what her writing was already guiding her towards becoming: a musician.

Part I - Getting Started

From: https://tidal.com/magazine/article/tidal-rising-q-a-japanese-breakfast/1-23500

The first song she learned how to play?

She was quickly writing and performing locally, as Little Girl, Big Spoon. Someone on reddit shared what is supposedly an early album of her’s.

Writing music was a navigation through adolescence, and all of its hardships, especially those of a half-Korean woman in America, an only child, and of a kid struggling to relate to her mother. Michelle got into a school on the other side of the country, Pennsylvania’s private women’s Bryn Mawr College, where she would quickly start a band with her classmates.

Post Post would release an EP, Meta Meta, on September 4th, 2009, Michelle’s first official release. The group planned a full LP, but it never developed.

If you know Japanese Breakfast’s music, you’ll immediately recognize the vocal and lyrical stylings of Zauner on this first release.

On the side, she played with a couple of friends from Portland, OR’s And And And. They called themselves Birthday Girlz, and with the group she would write a song called Everybody Wants to Love You.

Michelle graduated from Bryn Mawr in 2011, and started waiting tables and working coat checks, working towards her dream.

In 2011, Michelle co-founded another band with Kevin O’Hallaran, a college friend, Deven Craige, who they met at a Post Post show, and Ian Dykstra, who they met at a party. They called themselves Little Big League, and they released the Little Big League EP on April 1, 2012.

The band was genuinely successful, if only regionally. They would release a full-length album the next year, These Are Good People on August 6, 2013, and they would tour with it across the entire eastern U.S.

The next year, they would co-release an EP with the band Ovlov, titled Split, and on October 14, 2014, the band would release their second — and final — LP Tropical Jinx. They would put on another big tour, this time including Canada, and would even play Shea Stadium, which once housed the New York Mets.

During this time, particularly while the band was finished recording their first LP and shopping it to labels, Michelle filled her time by writing music for herself. In a style that Childish Gambino’s Donald Glover could maybe relate to, Michelle picked a name for herself:

”I think I just wanted something that sounded kind of curious, like something that sounded really American and well-known, like breakfast, and combining it with something that I think American people just associate with something exotic or foreign. I thought it would make people curious, like "What is a Japanese breakfast?" Japanese Breakfast is quite, like, beautiful and I really enjoy it. I think I was just looking at pictures of it one day and was just like, ‘Oh, I'll just release this album under this name.’”

She took up an internet prompt to write a song every day in the month of June, and she put it online.

She would release two more collections, before putting them for sale on cassette: Where is My Great Big Feeling? and American Sound.

Mostly, these were songwriting exercises and ways to meet people. She worked with Greta Kline from Frankie Cosmos, and several others, to write a song a day for one week, May 5th to May 12th.

On day 3, she learned that her mother had stage IV squamous cell carcinoma.

Try not to get

So righteous

About what’s fair

For everyone

try not to think about my life without you

try to channel every light in me to render this benign

try not to think about my life without you

try to channel every light in me to render this benign

Part 2 - Death/Birth

In Greek mythology, the “psychopomp” is a guide who escorts the living to the afterlife without any judgement.

Michelle would return home to Eugene that summer to help her parents. Her mother died on October 18th, 2015. She started writing.

She also moved to New York, accepting a job in 2015 as a clerk in an advertising company. She needed a job. Her music wasn’t taking her anywhere yet. Writing was her process of processing, not just music, but memoir and essays. She picked up with some friends to play local New York venues, but didn’t start a new band or release any music. She was surviving, getting by.

She and producer Ned Eisenberg, who was a friend from university and had helped her create American Sound, recorded an album. They released a single in January, 2016. Then two more, in February and March. Then, on April 1st, Japanese Breakfast released their first album: Psychopomp.

In Greek mythology, the “psychopomp” is a guide who escorts the living to the afterlife without any judgement.

The first track, In Heaven, is one of my favorite career openers ever. It is devastating, and markedly beautiful, and shows us the entirety of what we would come to know from Zauner: sharp, focused writing, sad and funny line-by-line; elements of her lo-fi, punk, emo, indie rock background, and an obvious interest in bigger, brighter sounds; a remarkable intelligence and understanding of production, direction, and creativity.

The album, which features some songs repurposed and reproduced from previous projects (The Woman that Loves You, Everybody Wants to Love You, Jane Cum), is a story of grief, survival, loneliness, joy. It is expansive and intimate. It would catch many critics’ eyes, and would get Michelle signed to a record company – Dead Oceans – who would re-release the album a few months later, to more fanfare.

Meanwhile, Zauner was still writing. She pitched an essay to Glamour, and won their essay contest. It was called Love, Loss, and Kimchi, and it would inspire her to keep writing, of Korea, of food, of her mother, of her life.

She would tour the album in America and Europe, with frequent collaborator Jay Som, as well as Mitski, and Porches.

Initially, after releasing Psychopomp, Michelle thought she would give up the music thing. But then, people found her work, and connected to it. Really connected to it. She decided she would keep making it.

Released on July 14, 2017, Soft Sounds from Another Planet developed a bit unevenly. Originally planned to be a sci-fi musical concept album, Zauner first toyed around with the idea of higher fidelities, expanded sounds, broader lyrical ideas. She wanted to move away from the deeply personal, lo-fi project that was Psychopomp. You can hear those ideas coming together in the first song Zauner wrote for the project: Machinist.

The sci-fi idea was eventually scrapped. It was too big of an idea, especially after having signed to a label for the first time, and feeling pressured to produce a certain kind of something. Zauner re-purposed some more songs from previous projects: Road Head and Jimmy Fallon Big! Were songs originally released on American Sound.

“Boyish” video is her magnum opus. The song, originally recorded for the Little Big League album Tropical Jinx (linked above), is a showcase for Zauner’s skills of arrangement and knack for open-air, chamber-pop sounds that would expand in her future work.

They made a browser-based video game to promote the album: Japanese BreakQuest. It features 8-bit versions of the songs from the album, and lets you play as “J.Brekkie” aboard a spaceship. You can still play it on the original site:

https://japanesebreakfast.rocks/BreakQuest/index.html

She would tour the album for over two years, including a stop on NPR’s Tiny Desk:

After years of public grief processing, and touring and writing and grinding, Michelle was ready for something new: a new project, a new sound, a new voice,

Part 3 - A New Emotion

“I feel like the third album is when you really understand who you are and what you have to offer as a musician, and what makes you unique, and it should feel really confident and bombastic. I was just trying to do that.”

Zauner, encouraged by long-time bandmate Craig Hendrix, started studying piano and composition. She started writing and arranging a new album in 2019.

Also, after writing another massively successful essay, “Crying in H Mart” for The New Yorker in 2018, Zauner was approached to write a book. She accepted the deal.

“I’m more interested in leaving behind this hyper vulnerable personal unpacking. I see myself heading in a more technical, crafty direction in both of my writing (platforms).”

When the pandemic hit, Zauner was fortunate to be in the middle of working. In addition to a book and an album, she collaborated with Ryan Galloway, leader of the band Crying, to make and release an EP – pop songs 2020 – under the group name BUMPER.

On April 20th, 2021, Michelle’s book was released. Originally, it was supposed to come out after her upcoming album. Now, it was coming out six weeks before. The bungled release schedule did not slow anything down: the book was an instant New York Times Best-Seller — it would stay on the list for 60 weeks — and was universally appraised. It won Zauner an American Book Award.

“Musically, I’m more interested in pushing my craft, and having it be rooted less in this personal narrative and more in constructing smarter songs.”

The result was massive. Complex, shimmering, danceable, instrumentally dense, and uniquely diverse, Jubilee was released on June 4th, 2021. Its lead single, ‘Be Sweet’, was a pop smash hit. It might be the best thing she’s ever made (so far). The album charted highly, a first in Zauner’s career. The album was nominated for the Best Alternative Music Album at the Grammys, Michelle’s first nomination.

A few months later, a videogame named Sable was released, which Michelle created the soundtrack to. The game’s creator sought her out personally, and Zauner created a 32 track collection of ambient songs to guide players through coming-of-age story. She called Better the Mask, a song from the album, her "favorite song [she has] ever written as an artist”.

Michelle was flying high. The sun was getting close. But she was smart enough to know that none of us ever fully make it, ever fully arrive. There is no time of enjoyment. Only work and fear of loss. She started to crumble.

“I was just keeled over with stomach pain before every show,” she says. “It was all stress and pressure and feeling like, I don’t deserve this. People are going to find out that I am an awful singer.”

So, she left for Korea.

Part 4 - Exploration

“And then I went … and it all went away. It was just stress — and not sleeping enough.”

Michelle, after years of wanting to, moved to Korea for a year. She sank into learning the language her mother spoke, and she started a diary. She was offered another book deal, for whatever she wanted to write, and she saw her opening. She had been interested in new and different forms and genres of writing, and her time in Korea provided the idea. This time, she’s writing about the here and now, not the then and there.

“My last record was joyous, and my book was heavy and intense. This time, it’s flipped—the record is more melancholy, and the book is joyful, funny, and hopefully heartwarming.”

Described in only one interview (so far), Michelle actually wrote and recorded her new album, For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Girls) before she left for Korea, in the aftermath of that stressful success. Like most of her previous work, it was written in an aftermath, and was designed to chase an emotion. Also like the others, it has a new and previously unexplored soundscape, arrangement, vibe. It was recorded in a real studio environment – Sound City Studios in Los Angeles – with producer Blake Mills, who has produced albums with Alabama Shakes, Feist, Perfume Genius, Fionna freaking Apple, and Bob freaking Dylan, among many others.

“It’s a bit gloomier—but in the best way.”

She’s taking things a little slower than she used to: less touring days, a several year book writing process. The movie adaptation of Crying in H Mart is in production purgatory, waiting for news.

The record comes out tomorrow. The tour starts soon.

“I actually saw a fortune teller before I left Korea, and I was like, ‘I had really bad stage fright the last few years. Is that going to be a thing?’ And she was like, ‘You’re a Year of the Snake. It’s your year. You’re not going to feel that way anymore.’ I’m just choosing to believe her wholeheartedly and see that to fruition.”

Thank you, as always, for reading. Just like my last songwriter deep dive for the latest Waxahatchee record, I didn’t give myself enough time for this project. All typos and errors are thus blamed on my former self. I am typing this outro from my phone while I ride the bus home. It’s giving me minor motion sickness.

I hope you go out and support this record, or another musician, sometime soon: but the digital album on bandcamp; buy it on vinyl; go see a show somewhere; come with me to the PBR festival this summer where Michelle will play on the same day as Built to Spill, who wrote the first song she ever learned on guitar.

Keep listening to music. Keep reading. Keep learning.

TTFN,

Bobby