Few touring musicians would have quite the reading list of Michelle Zauner. But there aren’t many like the 36-year-old Korean-American frontwoman of the band Japanese Breakfast, who will play one Auckland concert next month.
“I’m reading a great book by Jhumpa Lahiri called In Other Words, which is about her living in Italy and learning the Italian language,” Zauner says from her home in Brooklyn, New York. “And I just read Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company. Before that it was David Foster Wallace’s essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
“I’m working on my second book about my year abroad in Korea last year, so I’m specifically reading a lot of non-fiction.”
With her 2018 New Yorker essay Crying in H Mart leading to a book deal for her 2021 bestselling memoir of the same title – an examination of living between two cultures, identity, loss, food and her emergence as an artist – Zauner is an uncommon figure in contemporary music.
She also has five Japanese Breakfast albums behind her plus other collaborations, has recorded a soundtrack for the video game Sable, directs innovative videos for her band and other artists, and in 2022 was one of Time magazine’s “100 important innovators”.
Given all that and the attention she pays to Japanese Breakfast’s stage presentation, is it a stretch to mention David Bowie?
She doesn’t flinch. “He’s certainly someone who put detail and thought into his work, from the outfits he wore to the context which he put around an album.
“As [my career] got bigger and bigger it afforded me the opportunity to take my creativity and apply it to every single part of the project and the show, even down to the guitar picks and straps we use, the pre-show playlist, the walk-on music, what we wear.
“I’m trying my best to pay attention to the detail and show people who turn up for us that we really care about everything.”
An Auckland audience will see Japanese Breakfast on the back of their most recent recording, For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women), an album of orchestration, exotic instruments, pedal steel guitar and seductive songs described in these pages as “the accessible introduction to the kaleidoscopic career of Michelle Zauner”.
After two Japanese Breakfast albums, she had to find her footing as she dealt with her mother’s 2014 death from cancer, and the joyous, Grammy-nominated breakthrough album Jubilee. This new album was recorded in the famous Sound City studios in Los Angeles with go-to producer Blake Mills (Laura Marlin, Perfume Genius, Lucy Dacus).
The mythology of the place – Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and others recorded there – brought its own cachet. “Musicians have a firm belief in that kind of stuff.”
But Zauner is also pragmatic. “It felt special after all those years in freezing cold, semi-finished warehouses where I recorded my other records,” she laughs. “But it’s expensive to record in a space like that, so you have to be well prepared.”
She makes the analogy of shooting on film as opposed to digital (“you approach it differently, there’s more seriousness”), and how the available equipment as well as Mills’ contacts – which brought in Jeff Bridges on the country duet Men in Bars, and great players like drummer Jim Keltner – allowed more thought into how the album should feel.
“The songs are more subtle because I had more opportunity to let them be nuanced and to breathe, whereas my approach on other records was like putting make-up on … where you just keep putting it on! This one was done with more measured hands.”
I’m surgical in my reading and what I want to steal from people. I like to see how others approach the same topic.
Zauner, alienated from her American dad, notes that the seemingly cryptic Little Girl is “about a father estranged from his daughter and reflecting on the decisions he made in his life that got them to that place”.
She acknowledges an eerie undercurrent across the album despite its often-seductive surfaces and warm arrangements: “I was very purposeful in going towards a darker palette after three years of touring [Jubilee], which was boisterous and extroverted.
“The songs all come with a melancholy because the characters are grappling with regret and mistakes they made, and the passage of time. Melancholy is a character on the record.”
With that album behind her, attention moves again to writing, which means more reading.
“When I’m working on a new record, I very rarely listen to music to inform what I’m doing, but I’m always reading because it helps me write.
“I’m surgical in my reading and what I want to steal from people. I like to see how others approach the same topic and what works for them and what doesn’t, and how I can get it to work for me.”
Although Zauner’s successes have come quickly in the past few years – she admits to “a very charmed literary life” – she was a creative writing major in college. “It took 10 years to make a name for myself in music and about as long in writing.
“Crying in H Mart was a really personal and well-written story, so I think [my success] was truly deserved,” she laughs, noting she’s also been playing music in front of audiences for 20 years.
“Since childhood I’ve always been a bit of a ham, so I’ve been comfortable as the centre of attention.
“I have an imaginative mind so for certain periods I’m thinking about many different things. I love doing it all, so I just make time for it and on tour you have time. I wrote a lot of Crying in H Mart while on tour for [2017 album] Soft Sounds from Another Planet.
“I work harder than most people, so I’m not embarrassed by success at all.
“My day doesn’t feel rewarding unless I put time and effort into making something. It’s anchoring for me to have a project. When I’m on tour I try to set aside 30 minutes to an hour to show up to the page.
“I’m not wasting any time.”
Japanese Breakfast appear in the Auckland Winter Series, Auckland Town Hall, June 7.
