Michelle Zauner of Philadelphia's Japanese Breakfast joins The Current to play songs from her third studio record, Jubilee. Zauner catches up with us about expanding her sonic palate this record, and the release of her highly acclaimed debut memoir, Crying In H Mart.

Interview Transcription

Edited for clarity and length.

MADDIE: Hi I'm Maddie sitting down with another one of The Current's virtual sessions, you just heard "Be Sweet" from Japanese Breakfast. We are sitting down today with Michelle Zauner to talk a little bit about the upcoming album Jubilee. Thank you Michelle for taking the time to be here.

MICHELLE ZAUNER: Thank you for having me.

We're gonna listen to one more track off the upcoming album. Then have a little conversation about music and all of that good stuff. Here is Japanese Breakfast now with "Kokomo, IN".

[music: "Kokomo, IN" by Japanese Breakfast]

You just heard "Kokomo, IN" from Japanese Breakfast. I'm sitting down with Michelle today to talk about the Japanese Breakfast's upcoming album, Jubilee. Michelle, how are you doing today?

I'm doing good.

I know that you had mentioned earlier that you're in your apartment in Brooklyn. How is your springtime routine been? What have you been up to? What's been keeping you busy?

Oh, I've mostly just been doing interviews for the album and the book from my apartment. But I'm looking forward to the weather getting really nice and playing shows again, hopefully pretty soon here.

Yeah. That's kind of a crazy timeline to have your memoir Crying In H Mart come out this April, and now we've got Jubilee on the way in just a couple of weeks now, June 4. What was the timeline like in creating those two projects for you?

Sure. I submitted my rough draft for the book in July of 2019. Then I had like a six month window of time between when my editor had the book, and when I would start tackling the revision. So I wrote the album from July 2019 to December 2019. The record was actually supposed to come out in the summer of 2020, and then got pushed a year later. So now they're sort of coming up coming out on top of each other.

Having the album in that interim period with your book, do you think that writing a book changed the way that you approach songwriting for this new album?

I think in a way the last two records, and then this book, were largely about grief and loss and losing my mom to cancer in 2014. I think that the book really afforded me all the space that I needed to to talk about that experience. I was able to kind of shift gears and start this new chapter with this album, which is largely about joy and new themes in my artistic work for the first time in seven years. So I feel like that's how the book helped me sort of land on this new unexpected theme of joy.

How do you feel joy manifests itself in your songwriting? I know some of these singles we have so far like "Posing" and "Bondage" are still songs that are very heady and less overtly happy, what does joy mean to you in songwriting?

I think that the album tackles joy as a broad theme. Some of the songs on the record are about protecting joy or struggling to feel joy or reminding yourself joy or giving yourself permission to feel joy. They're all different ways of interacting with joy and sometimes it feels sonically more upbeat, and sometimes it doesn't. I feel like joy is a rare and precious thing and most of the time, it's something that we're chasing and so I think a lot of the songs are about that.

Yeah, you mentioned that you ended writing this album towards the end of 2019. Then having the album delayed, do you think that the way that you look at these songs has changed over the past two years?

Yeah, I still think it's my best work, if anything, the time away from it made me appreciate those those songs even more and understand their hopeful lasting power. But I find as I get older, and this sort of novelty of finishing a large creative project kind of wears off I don't have the same kind of appreciation for my work when I finish it. When I finished the album and when I finished the book, I didn't feel anything. I felt very confused and sort of devastated that it was just over and that was it, and now it just takes me a longer period of time to understand their strengths and whether or not I even enjoy it, you know? That's a new thing that actually coming back to this record a year later makes me appreciate it even more.

It's gonna be exciting to get to see these songs live for the first time we have our sort of like virtual versions of those, and I know you have tour dates on the way in the fall. How do you feel about performing live in this sort of new sonic palette that I hear you exploring on some of these tracks?

I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be a real wild ride trying to figure out how to make some of these songs come to life because there's a lot of instrumentation that we couldn't tour with, like a symphony or anything but we're adding two more members. We're probably gonna have Adam Schatz on on the saxophone and we're gonna have some amazing Swiss Army Knife of a musician play violin and guitar and maybe even harp sometimes. I'm really excited to bring these songs to life. I think they're going to be really fantastic live.

Yeah, I'm really excited to see them. What motivated you or inspired you to bring in this different instrumentation and all these different sounds on this album?

I think I just had enough time to feel confident in handling the arrangement of them, like our palate just got larger. Part of that was touring for the last three years and getting to meet all these extraordinary musicians like Adam Schatz from Landlady and Molly Germer, who plays violin and comes with this whole network of fantastic string players. Also working with Craig Hendricks, who is our live drummer, but has also co produced this album, and the last record, has this Berklee School of Music education, and he really gave me the confidence to try writing horn and string arrangements on my own. Collaborating on those for this record just made a lot more sense, and especially when we were going for a third album that felt more theatrical and ambitious and bombastic. It felt pretty natural to incorporate more larger arrangements onto it.

How was being at home for now a year and a couple months changed how you look at your music, and how you look at writing music?

I'm not sure. I think that one nice thing was that I got a lot better at the piano. I was practicing a lot of piano and I think that there's some some comfort in practicing an instrument especially during a time in which you have very little control over a situation that you can return to this practice and watch yourself slowly get get better at something. I think that there's a comfort in that especially during a time where nothing is really in your control. So I found a lot of comfort in practicing the piano and the guitar during this time. Nerdy answer.

Just continually practicing and getting better at things. But that's such a such an interesting way to look at it--having these kind of metrics that aren't time, to measure time passing, is a valuable and probably healthy way to look at the past year.

Definitely. Adam Schatz, the saxophone player, he has like this really incredible piece in The New York Times about learning this really difficult Reggie Newman song that I would highly recommend people check out.

Absolutely. We're gonna hear another song from you here in this session, and it's part of your project BUMPER, which you released an EP for at the tail end of 2020. Do you want to talk about that project a little bit, and what kind of motivated you to jump in on that one?

Yeah, I think that because the record got pushed back a year I wanted to do something that got to be released immediately. It just scratched the itch that was taken from me in this way. So Ryan Galloway, who plays in this extremely underrated band called Crying, it's actually my neighbor, he lives like three blocks away from me. But this was during, I think June, during lockdown. So we never actually saw each other, we were just passing songs back and forth to make this EP for this like--it's kind of just like a pop EP. It's just an unapologetically very pop, sort of inspired by a Japanese city pop music. We started working together on on a track called "Slide Tackle" that's on the album. And I've just always really admired him, and when we were working on that song, he showed me this folder of real bops that he had no real plans to do anything with. So I was like, "We should open those up and write some pop songs together." So we passed those back and forth, but this song was the kind of outlier on that EP. It was called "Ballad 0" and was this piano track I submitted and he took it in this weird direction and I wasn't like totally happy with it. So we reworked it as a band into this almost country duet, which I liked a lot more and maybe will end up on like, the fourth Japanese Breakfast record or something. It makes no sense for me to put this out now, but I think has just been really fun to play live and so I wanted to include it on there.

That's one thing that I know I've been missing a lot is when bands are able to pull in like these live songs that maybe haven't had a place on the record yet and share those with audiences and so it's really cool that we're gonna get to experience that here. Completely aside, one of my best friends has just been saying that this is the summer of the country duet and so it's so funny that that is--I don't know why she's come to that conclusion, but I'm excited that Japanese Breakfast is also kind of there in the world of the duet. Well, I'm super excited to hear the country duet rendition of "Bumper 0" here. Thank you again, Michelle, for sitting down with me today.

Thank you for having me.

[music: "Bumper 0" by BUMPER]

This has been another one of The Current's virtual sessions. Thank you to Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast for being here. Thank you to Evan Clark for engineering this session, Jesse Wiza for producing and the members of Minnesota Public Radio for making it all possible.

Songs Played

00:03 Be Sweet
03:50 Kokomo, IN
18:17 Bumper 0 (by BUMPER)
The first two songs appear on Japanese Breakfast's 2021 release Jubilee, and "Bumper 0" appears on BUMPER's EP pop songs 2020.

External Link

Japanese Breakfast - official site

Credits

Host - Maddie
Digital Producer - Jesse Wiza
Producer - Derrick Stevens
Technical Director - Evan Clark