Michelle Zauner Faced the “Double-Edged Sword” of Success and Turned It Into Japanese Breakfast’s “Creepy” New Album

“I just always pictured myself being quite a small artist,” says Michelle Zauner. “I never thought I was going to be an artist that had a lighting designer or production designer. I thought I was going to be an artist that would be lucky to have a Holiday Inn to sleep at with the entire band.”

But after the success of her memoir, Crying in H Mart, an artful exploration of her Korean American identity and grief following her mother’s death in 2014, which spent more than 60 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, Zauner began to transcend the indie music scene where she had comfortably dwelled for years as the frontwoman of the band Japanese Breakfast. Her subsequent critically acclaimed album, Jubilee, sonically and thematically veered into pop territory, earned her two Grammy nominations, and only further catapulted her into stardom.

Almost four years later, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, confronts her triumphs without shunning them, but casts a much darker, looming shadow over her future than her previous releases. Over the course of 10 tracks, Zauner paints a sweeping portrait of an artist as intricate as the oil paintings and gothic literature that inspired her. On the final track of the album, “Magic Mountain,” named after the Thomas Mann novel that she read while in Switzerland, Zauner ponders the innate narcissism associated with pursuing her own artistic desires while grappling with the potential for a happy life.

“I was a little bit afraid to talk about that because, honestly, I don’t want the narrative of this record to be like, ‘Woe is me. I’ve found success. It’s hard,’” she says. “Being a musician means that you have to be away from your family and your friends and you miss out on big life events of the people that you love. You miss out on weddings and funerals and people’s lives changing and having babies. I feel so lucky to get to pursue what I love, but it’s a double-edged sword because there’s a lot of times I feel like a bad friend and family member, and I’m so focused on my life being centered around work.”

Squeezing in this interview over Zoom, on a drive back to New York after shooting a music video in New Jersey, she mourns the milestones she’s missed because of her career. “I think in the last few years I started realizing that I needed to find a little bit more of a balance in all of that. Especially being a woman artist and thinking about having a child someday and the possibility of that and mourning the amount of labor that I will be able to put in once that happens.”

Zauner points to iconic women like Dolly Parton and Stevie Nicks who have devoted their lives to their work, and she carefully considers what path to go down herself. At 35 years old, she admits it’s something she thinks about a lot—and feels the frustration and melancholy attached to those decisions. “There’s this kind of anticipatory grief of the things in your life that you realize you no longer have time to pursue,” she says. “I think about that a lot at this point in my life, just reckoning with the Sylvia Plath fig tree of opportunities that will be no longer.”

In the winter of 2022, while still touring Jubilee, Zauner began writing For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). She knew she wanted to write a “creepy” album with an “eerie palette,” something that would certainly be a departure from her previous album.

When writing a new record, Zauner says she tried “not to be influenced by music too much,” and instead turned to other art forms. “When I write prose or when I wrote my book, I was constantly reading books and looking for really specific examples of how a writer talked about the weather or took some bad news or said something that they didn’t want to say. I would try to figure out exactly how a writer was making those specific moments work,” she says. “But the idea of doing that with music and being like, okay, how does a musician write about melancholy and let’s study that—I think it’s really, really dangerous, really hard to not just copy that or get that sound out of your head and try to deviate from what another artist is doing,” she says.

She visited the Museo del Prado during a tour stop in Madrid and was struck by two large paintings. The artworks, which are part of a series by the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera, depict figures from Greek mythology—Ixion and Tityus—being graphically tormented, in a state of eternal punishment. “I think all of the songs are kind of about men—about people making mistakes and being confronted with the consequences or punishments of that,” she explains.

To delve deeper, Zauner devoured classic gothic fiction like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Then she found herself reading books that she describes as having become a part of the incel canon. Most notably Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. She was also “weirdly into David Fincher movies” at that time, she says.

“I think I’ve always grown up very afraid of men,” she says with a nervous laugh. “I don’t know if it’s just the way that my family raised me—to just be a very suspicious and careful person in that way. But I’ve always been very nervous about men’s capability for violence.”

She adds, “I think in some ways these melancholy brunettes and sad women are lamenting some male bad behavior in their life, or there’s songs about men who have made mistakes and want too much, or to step out of their marriage or a relationship in their life.” On the album, “There are all these kinds of stories about people coping with consequences due to succumbing to some kind of temptation or something. I think that that is the narrative thread.”

Looking back, when Zauner first announced the name of the album the internet was divisive. “If people thought For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) was annoying, they would have loved Hephaestus Lit the Fire,” she says with a laugh when asked about alternative titles. Hephaestus, the god of fire, she says, has always been her favorite god. “I’ve always related [to him] because I’ve always seen myself as this sort of disfigured creature that makes beautiful things,” says Zauner. “I’ve just always really identified with him.”

“I feel like it was meant to be a little bit tongue in cheek. I like these really long album titles like Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn… and the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and the 1975’s I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It,” she says. “I like it when artists get a little bit annoying.”

After finishing the album in 2023, which was produced by Blake Mills and recorded at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles (a first for Japanese Breakfast, after making their first three records in DIY spaces), Zauner spent a year living in Korea. “My mom always used to say to me, ‘If you lived in Korea for a year, I think you could just wind up fluent.’ So I wanted to put that to the test,” she says. It was meant to be a break from touring and work but “in very ‘me’ fashion I turned the idea of taking a break into a project.”

Zauner fully immersed herself in the culture. “It was meaningful in ways that I never even anticipated,” she says. “It was really wonderful because I got to be close to my family, what little family I have left, and I got to make friends that have similar cultural backgrounds.”

It was a transformative experience that brought her closer to her late mother. Month after month, as she gained a firmer grasp on the language, she was able to better communicate with her only aunt, her mother’s older sister, and learn more about her mother. “I think when someone dies, the only way that you have of feeling close to them, because you can’t create new memories with each other anymore, is getting to learn new memories that other people have with them. It’s kind of the closest you can get to feeling like you’re spending time with them again.”

She also began ruminating on her follow-up to Crying in H Mart. “While I was there, I just kept a diary, and so I kept a diary for 10 minutes every day for the last two years, and that has 500,000 words of material.” Zauner also found her mother’s diary from early adulthood and started to translate it. “I think on tour I’ll start kind of rereading through all of those journals and editing them and sort of finding the arc of the narrative and putting that together this year slowly.”

It’s not lost on Zauner that the release of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) arrives during a particularly fraught time, politically and culturally, especially for many women. When I ask how she remains grounded, she offers a seed of hope. “I just try to be a good person, and I think my work has always been something that’s been very helpful for me. Sometimes it’s hard not to get fatalistic and want to give up completely, so I think that trying to be involved with things that feel within my control and trying to make an impact in at least small ways is centering,” she says.

In the year ahead, Zauner will be confronted with many things that are out of her control as Japanese Breakfast embarks on a tour in support of the album. Starting next month, in the California desert on the Coachella stage, the days will get longer—and louder—than Zauner has been used to as of late. She’s been mentally and physically preparing for this upcoming endurance test, taking vocal lessons, devoting time to guitar practice, and hitting the gym. “It’s kind of getting all my callouses back and getting physical stamina back to get into fighting form,” she says.

Yet as Zauner’s star continues to rise, she’s careful not to fly too close to the sun, taking care of practical touring matters that bring her right back down to earth. “I’m strategizing what to put on the rider and if I should bring a rice cooker on tour,” she says.