An Interview with Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner
VAULT caught up with Michelle Zauner, the sonic genius behind Japanese Breakfast, ahead of the release of her latest album, For Melancholy Brunettes (and sad women).
Image credit: Japanese Breakfast. Photo: Pak Bae
How would you describe For Melancholy Brunettes (and sad women)?
I think it's my most mature work. It's a very guitar-focused album. The songs, as the title might have suggested, are quite melancholy; I think they are sort of all tied together by this theme of people who feel seduced by or succumb to some kind of temptation and are then facing or evaluating the consequences and that is what the album is about.
Tell me about the name of the album – it’s so good!
The title comes from a short story I read in a John Cheever book called The World of Apples. It's about a man who's in a terrible marriage and is fantasising about all the different types of women that he wants to sleep with. Some of them are “melancholy brunettes”, and some of them are “sad women”, and so on. I just thought that combination of words is so funny, and it also felt like a very apt descriptor of myself.
I liked the idea of having a title that was a little bit longer, sort of tongue in cheek and a little bit divisive; sort of self-serious, but also kind of silly, about people who are just brooding types and the way that we move through the world. I think a lot of the songs are about really deep emotions and circumstances.
There are things that I would imagine that deep thinkers would ruminate over. I like the idea of it feeling like the Brontës or something, writing about these types of people and that being the sort of signifier for the album.
This album has a powerful visual identity. What art were you looking at while conceptualising this project?
I initially wanted to write a creepy album because I thought that, in juxtaposition to this bright yellow album about joy [Jubilee, 2021], it would be a really interesting path to take. I knew that it was going to have a darker palette.
I was first really interested in Goya's, um, ‘black paintings.’ So, it was really important for me when we were in Madrid for the first time to see them at the Prado. And while we were at the Prado, I was really struck by Ribera's Four Furies. Tityus and Ixion are the two remaining ones. They are these really large, very dark paintings of men being tortured. I think that somehow found its way into my subconscious and felt like it wove its way into many of the different songs’ themes, you know, which I think are largely about men making mistakes and the melancholy brunettes who have to suffer them. They're about men wanting more than they're supposed to and suffering some consequence from the gods or some higher existence. So, those paintings were very influential.
There's a Grützner painting called The Connoisseur. I don't know how I stumbled upon it, but it's a painting of a monk drinking a glass of wine or beer. And that made me think about this character that's in the Orlando in Love video: a friar who brews beer at the Abbey, but he's kind of a slacker, and he can't get his shit together. He's just drinking and drunk all the time, daydreaming about various things instead of, you know, copying scrolls. Then he begins to dream about the siren, and even though the siren murders him in his fantasy, he must run to her. These two other monks try to get him to stay in the Abbey, but they can't keep up with him. He runs towards the sea and dies in the process. So, I was very influenced by that painting. And the backdrop of the siren is a Caspar David Friedrich painting called Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.
I think I really just love the idea of this whimsical romantic protagonist who is a little dumb and very easily seduced by fantasy. I liked the idea of all of the characters in this album kind of yearning for more than they're supposed to. I think that comes from my personal place of reckoning with my limitations as a human being, wanting to pursue my work almost to a dangerous degree in terms of what I physically take on.
Mm-hmm. Well, as I said, I loved Orlando in Love and its visuals. It's almost surreal, it's very Romantic, Baroque. The actual Orlando character also reminded me of Virginia Woolf's Orlando with the switching between sexes and the surreality of its environment.
Yeah, I mean, I love both that novel and the adaptation by Sally Potter. The movie influenced the style I wanted for my Orlando character.
Can you tell me a bit about where that Orlando character comes from?
Orlando also weirdly kind of came from that John Cheever book. There's a different story about a man who encounters a relic in a subway station, an epic poem called Orlando Furioso. I was really curious about what that was and wanted to read about it. I then found while researching that the poem that it's based on is by a Renaissance Italian poet named Boiardo. His epic poem is called Orlando Innamorato, which translates to ‘Orlando in Love.’
I also think it has something to do with a book called The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. The character is a man named Hans Castorp, a similar sort of fanciful, somewhat stupid, romantic, bourgeoisie guy who similarly finds himself ill-fated. I think that it was a culmination of those references.
What was the conception of this album? Which song did you start with? Was it Orlando?
It was definitely one of the early ones. Once I had gotten that one, I realised, oh, there's an album here. I could kind of see this thread. Mega Circuit was also pretty early on, and Honeywater. I knew I wanted most of the songs to begin with guitar and though I honestly can't remember which one was first, those were kind of earlier ones.
So, this is your first proper studio recording after using improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts. What was it like recording at Sound City? How was it different?
It was a really profound, different experience. It was amazing. I've never been in a space meant specifically for that function and woah: the gear they have there!
Blake Mills and Joseph Lorge are incredible, brilliant, creative professionals. Blake has also spent many years as a session guitar player and has this kind of incredible rolodex of amazing musicians to call in.
So, we had Jim Keltner, who's played on everything from Bob Dylan to John Lennon to Dolly Parton and was a Traveling Wilbury. He played drums on Dreamweaver, which is insane.
So, we had these kind of like California legends come in to play on some of these songs.
Image credit: Album cover of Japanese Breakfast’s For Melancholy Brunettes (and sad women), 2025
Can you tell me a bit about the album artwork?
Yeah, of course. So, it started with seeing one painting, and then a bunch of other paintings popped up that featured a melancholic-looking woman passed out at large cafe tables. I was just overwhelmed by melancholy and sort of suspended in a fugue state. I liked that idea being on the album cover, but not having my face featured.
I wanted it to feel like a painting or still life and then have the set design and props all correspond to a symbolic meaning. There's obviously the skull, which is memento mori; I think a lot of this record is kind of about contemplating mortality.
There are oysters, which are a nod to the Venus in a Shell in Orlando in Love, and honey water and a milky broth, both track titles.
There is a bowl of guts, which I referenced in Here is Someone, and there's a vase of flowers, which I referenced in Winter in LA. So, all the objects on the table are nods to different lyrics. I wanted to emulate these myths or presuppositions of what certain things are supposed to stand for in still-life paintings. I also think it can be interpreted that there's just a wealth of goods in front of me, and somehow, it's still overwhelming and exhausting. That was kind of how I felt for the last few years, I think.
For Melancholy, Brunettes (& Sad Women) is out March 21, 2025, on Dead Oceans.
