It’s the night before Japanese Breakfast plays a Pasadena music festival, and Michelle Zauner, the woman behind the stage name, has rushed through a steak dinner to make time to talk about the whirlwind of her life this year.
Her set at the Head In The Clouds Festival on Saturday was the first of four Southern California shows for her in less than two weeks, and these come after a pair of sold-out shows in Los Angeles in September.
Two weeks ago, she released her third record of 2021, a live collection that follows her third album “Jubilee” and the mostly instrumental “Sable” videogame soundtrack.
“Crying In H Mart,” her critically acclaimed 2021 memoir of food and family, love and loss, continues to find new fans and appear on best-of lists even as it heads for adaptation into a movie for which Zauner will write the screenplay and create the soundtrack.
“I think December through February, I’m going to be at home working on the screenplay and taking some well-deserved time off,” Zauner says. “I’m really looking forward to it, but I can’t really complain.
“I do really love my work, and I’m very happy at the response,” she says.
Two kinds of courtship
“It’s been really strange and very different,” Zauner says of her return to the road and live shows, though the sentiment fits her year in general, too.
“I think that I’ve always had a lot of anxiety when it comes to starting a cycle for a record,” she says. “Because it always just feels like: ‘What could we do to enhance the show? Do I deserve to be here? Was this increased profile warranted?’”
“Jubilee” also represents a step forward for Japanese Breakfast, with more elaborate arrangements and instrumentation than on its predecessors “Soft Sounds From Another Planet” and “Psychopomp.”
“I knew that I wanted to have a violin player and a saxophone player (on tour), and that it was going to be a bigger show,” Zauner says. “We’ve added a lighting designer. We’re on a tour bus for the first time. It’s been really exciting getting to try it again.
“But it was definitely riddled with a lot of anxiety initially,” she says. “Though now we’re finally in the sort of homestretch and I feel much more at ease than I once was.”
Shifting between festival gigs, with their shorter sets, and her own headlining gigs provides different kinds of pleasures, Zauner says.
“I always kind of compare that to different types of courtship – both are pretty enjoyable in their own way,” she says.
“I think that when you play a festival, it’s kind of like flirting for the first time, and there’s something really enchanting about that experience,” Zauner says. “And then when you play a headlining show, it feels more like a relationship or a marriage, where people know you and support you already and expect a different type of effort.”
So at Desert Daze on Sunday, Japanese Breakfast will play “the flashier numbers, and put out our most bombastic material,” she says. “And that’s always really fun.
“And then it’s also fun [for her own shows] to take your time and play slower, more B-side type of material for people who enjoy and want that kind of thing.”
Pulling out all the stops
A lot of thought went into the making of “Jubilee,” says Zauner, who was determined to take a step forward with the third Japanese Breakfast studio album.
“I thought a lot about other artists I admired and their discography,” she says. “And where they were at for their third album, and what that sort of represented to me.
“And coming from ‘Soft Sounds,’ which was a record that had a lot of pressure and fear of just suffering from the sophomore slump, I wanted the third album to feel very confident and almost melodramatic at times.
“I wanted big arrangements.”
Asked what artists and third albums inspired her she doesn’t hesitate.
“I think Björk’s ‘Homogenic,’” Zauner says. “It’s to me, like, I think every indie musician kind of looks to Björk for some guidance in a way. Or Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine’ or Beach House’s ‘Teen Dream’ or Wilco’s ‘Summerteeth.’
“They all sound to me like an artist really knowing who they are at this point in their career, and, you know, pulling out all the stops.”
A mother, a daughter
“Crying In H Mart,” was published in April and debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. The story revolves around the moment Zauner learned her mother had cancer, and how her illness and death changed everything.
Her mother was born and raised in South Korea, her father is American. In the memoir, she writes of living in the space between cultures, the way she and her mother bonded over traditional Korean food, and how in the absence of her mother she had to navigate a path to an unknowable future.
It’s a story that percolated for years. Zauner in 2016 won Glamour magazine’s essay of the year contest with a piece that talked of her imagined relationship with Maangchi, a Korean YouTuber known for her cooking videos.
“I just thought it was a very cute kind of ‘Julia and Julia’ sort of story,” she says.
Two years later, after Japanese Breakfast’s Asian tour, Zauner stayed behind in South Korea for six weeks and started writing what in time became the memoir. Some of that work ended up in the New Yorker as an essay that now opens “Crying In H Mart.”
“Parts of it were a real joy,” she says of writing the book. “Because it felt in a way like I was revisiting and uncovering memories that had been kind of buried by this very traumatic experience of caretaking and being witness to a disease taking hold.
“And so my entry point was really just focusing on these very beautiful parts of my childhood and on my relationship with my mother and what was sort of lost,” Zauner says.
The book also forced her to face the trauma and pain of a year divided by the loss of her mother: six months of her mother’s terminal journey, and another six months of Zauner packing up her childhood home as her relationship with her father changed.
“Those were the two major things I was going through, I think, just investigating what had happened and making sense of what had happened,” she says. “And in a way, it felt almost like I was trying to prove to other people what I had endured.
“I just really didn’t feel like anyone understood what I had experienced, and I needed people to know, and I needed myself to understand and process that through this book.”
A good problem to have
Zauner laughs when asked what she expected or hoped the response to her memoir would be.
“I don’t think I anticipated this response,” she says. “I think it ran the gamut. Like there were moments in which I was incredibly proud of the work and felt like it was something very unique and special.
“And there were parts where I thought I would be picked apart and destroyed and canceled,” Zauner says, laughing again. “I am very grateful for the way that it turned out.”
Her story may be specific to her own experiences, but the themes can reach anyone, she says to explain why she thinks readers have responded to the book so strongly.
“Many people know grief very deeply,” Zauner says. “It’s a mother-daughter story, and there are many mothers and daughters in the world, and many of them have these types of complicated relationships they can relate to.”
As well, the themes of food and family and growing up a mixed-race person have also connected with readers.
“They’re all just very universal themes that anyone can relate to,” she says.
In June, Orion Pictures acquired the book to adapt into a film; Zauner took on the job of adapting it for the screen and supervising the soundtrack.
“So, I am supposed to be writing the screenplay,” she says. “But it’s been really difficult for me to reenter that story again.”
Not because it’s painful to revisit, she adds. She’d just rather think about something new.
“It’s this artistic desire to write something completely new,” Zauner says. “I think that’s honestly the hardest part for me. In a way, I felt like I’ve said everything I needed to say about that experience.
“So that’s been challenging because it doesn’t feel like I’m starting from scratch, you know, which is part of the real joy of creation, I think.”
She has an idea for another nonfiction book, perhaps something about learning the Korean language or spending a year in the country of her mother’s birth.
“But it’s difficult to find time with the sort of wealth of riches I’ve stumbled on creatively,” Zauner says. “I can’t complain about the type of response (this year).
“It’s a great problem to have,” she says, laughing again. “But I am tired.”
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