Her memoir was a literary sensation. It also sucked the joy out of her day job

For Michelle Zauner, the musician better known by her indie rock cypher Japanese Breakfast, the phrase “indie success” is an interesting oxymoron. She’s suddenly living it, but you get the sense she’d send it back if she could.

In 2021, after years of toiling in the comfortable seclusion of the DIY-sphere, the 35-year-old became a literary sensation following the publication of her memoir, Crying in H Mart. The book – Zauner’s moving account of losing her mother, and her truest link to her Korean identity, to cancer and her attempts to reclaim it via the food they shared – earned global acclaim and spent 55 weeks on The New York Times′ bestseller list.

That same year, the book’s success siphoned a new wave of attention towards Zauner’s musical day-job, including Grammy nominations for best new artist (almost a decade into Japanese Breakfast’s existence) and best alternative music album for her third album, Jubilee. For an indie-lifer, it’s been understandably discombobulating.

Zauner performing on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show last month. Her new album’s inspired by the “gothic, creepy, romantic canon of literature”.Credit: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images

“I never anticipated this band growing to this size. It’s been truly delightful but also incredibly challenging, and it’s been hard for me to be at the centre of that,” says Zauner from her living room in Brooklyn, her black semi-bob and black blouse popping gothically against a bright yellow wall covered in paintings and framed family photographs. “I feel kind of misplaced, you know?”

In the press notes for her new album For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women), her first album since Japanese Breakfast’s breakout success, Zauner hinted at an uneasiness with the sudden adoration. The things she long took for granted as a normal part of band life – like getting drunk before a show and being hungover the whole next day – are no longer appropriate.

“It’s become a very serious job,” Zauner says. “It used to just be me and my friends driving around the country and drinking beers and playing shows, and then it was no longer that. All of a sudden, I’m responsible for the livelihoods of 15 different people. All of a sudden, tickets are no longer $15, they’re $80, and the rooms are no longer 200 people but 2000 people. There’s this new pressure of, like, it’s not just fun and games any more, this is your job and people expect something from you, and if you want to grow and maintain that, then you have to change. It’s been heartbreaking to deal with.”

Even with exhaustion seeping in – it’s near 7pm in New York, she’s spent the whole day shooting a video and has back-to-back interviews following this one – Zauner is animated, the natural intensity of a wide-eyed cartoon character. But suffice to say, these professional demands? It’s not why she got into this lifestyle. Even worse is the entitlement she’s felt emerging from the new daily grind.

“I never imagined doing television or being nominated for a Grammy or any of the stuff we did the last few years, but now I’m in a position where it’s like, if we don’t get asked to do the late night talk shows, I’m like, ‘Something is wrong!’ That’s a crazy position to be in! And I hate that feeling, I hate it. I don’t want to be that kind of artist, but it’s hard to not be.”

Japanese Breakfast playing Coachella in 2022. The crowds and venues keep getting bigger.Credit: Getty Images for Coachella

Zauner, born in Seoul and raised in Oregon, started Japanese Breakfast in Philadelphia in 2013, a couple of years after she’d graduated from Bryn Mawr College. The band’s first album was the hazy Psychopomp, recorded while she was working at an advertising agency and released in 2015 through Dead Oceans, the indie label she’s still with.

For an indie artist starting at the bottom, success’ progression is clear: bigger rooms, bigger crowds, bigger receipts. At this point, can Zauner even recognise the next steps? “I mean, it’s as basic as, like, going from one bus to two buses. Or, like, hiring an LD [lighting designer] tech. I’m just like, what the f--- even is that?” she laughs. “I understand why they’re necessary, but who at 16 years old is like, ‘I hope I’m big enough one day to get an LD tech …’ It’s such boring stuff!”

‘People going through a hard time because they’ve made some sort of mistake involving temptation.’

Sometimes it’s the boring stuff that makes you realise you’re in the big time, Zauner says. “We have something in the band called ‘PGPA’, which is ‘pro gear, pro attitude’. I remember the first time I spent $200 on a pedal case. I’m not saying a pedal, I’m saying the actual professional case to house the expensive pedals! That’s the kind of stuff we have to look forward to now. It’s not fun. And all that stuff is just stressful because you’re like, ‘How are we paying for all this? Why is this stupid boring thing so expensive?’ But that’s kind of the weird, big-getting-bigger place that we’re at now.” She laughs, defeated.

Whatever pressure she’s feeling, Zauner is adamant it didn’t affect For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women). “I went in understanding that it was not gonna feel the same way,” she says. “But album four, that’s the artist’s record. I just wanted to make a record that I loved, and not think about what other people wanted from me.”

Despite a cameo from Oscar winner Jeff Bridges on the lilting saloon track Men in Bars (a favour called in by producer Blake Mills), the album touches on Japanese Breakfast’s typical pleasure points; swooning and sophisticated, it’s indie rock so literate you could discuss it at book club. Leda, awash in chiming guitars and cellos, is inspired by the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, while the album’s fantastic title is a line taken from single Orlando in Love, which is not, as the well-read might expect, a nod to Virginia Woolf’s novel, but rather Orlando Innamorato, a 15th century epic by the Italian Renaissance poet Boiardo.

“I was reading Jane Eyre and Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights and purposefully trying to steer myself into this gothic, creepy, romantic canon of literature,” Zauner explains. “I also visited the Prado for the first time and was really struck by Ribera’s Furias and those stories of men suffering the consequences of the gods. They’re like warning songs – people going through a hard time because they’ve made some sort of mistake involving temptation.”

For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women) is Japanese Breakfast’s first album since 2021’s Grammy-nominated Jubilee.Credit:

The shuffling alt-country song Mega Circuit, in which Zauner sings of ATV-riding “incel eunuchs” and the “soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded”, hits a theme that Zauner – bisexual, but famously married to bandmate (and Crying in H Mart hero) Peter Bradley, aka Mr Breakfast, since 2014 – has reckoned with across her discography, of toxic masculinity and a yearning for men to be better. Amid Trump and the prevailing broligarchy, it feels especially pointed.

“As a young girl, it was very instilled in me that men were dangerous and capable of great harm and that they were to be careful around. I always thought it was interesting to be entwined in humanity with another gender that you’re supposed to be both close to and afraid of,” she says of her lyrical preoccupation with deficient men. Like most of us, she’s concerned about the return of macho manhood and the cultural backlash to feminism’s dent on patriarchy.

“The patriarchy is changing, positions of power are changing, and there’s a whole generation of young men that don’t know what to do with themselves. And they’re either being scolded for not submitting to the changing of the tides, which is fair, or they’re being celebrated by a side that’s committed to conservative ideals,” Zauner says.

The recent US election exposed that it’s not just fringe sexists, but “a lot of young men hiding in plain sight”, she says. “They don’t have any positive masculine role models, and they feel pushed into a corner and that their only option is to be this submissive, roll-over, woke guy, or that they’re being supported and get to be who they are by this other side.”

Surprisingly, the video for Mega Circuit – co-directed by Zauner and longtime collaborator Adam Kolodny – is remarkably tender, a sort of backwoods 1979, depicting suburban boys innocently at play with their off-road buggies and air rifles. “I didn’t want it to be, ‘And these are the incels!’” Zauner says with a laugh.

“I thought it was sweet to show these moments of boyhood. Where does that turn into violence? How do we raise them to not be this way? How do we support a positive kind of masculinity? I wanted to approach it with compassion because if we continue to isolate these young men, they’re gonna go so far to the right.”

After a planned screen adaptation of Crying in H Mart was suddenly scrapped – the film was to be directed by Will Sharpe (The White Lotus) from a screenplay that Zauner completed; “It was tough … the timing was not right,” Zauner says of her Hollywood experience – she spent all of 2024 living in Seoul in service of her next book, a memoir about her attempt to become fluent in Korean.

Zauner reads from her memoir Crying in H Mart just after its publication in 2021. Credit: Getty Images for The Recording Academy

She even enrolled at Sogang University as part of her efforts, the mature-age student surrounded by teenage undergrads. Did anyone recognise her? “Some of them did,” Zauner admits shyly. “It’s one of those things you fantasise about as a high-schooler, where you’re like, if I was an adult and I knew better and I got to go back to school, I would be really popular. And it’s heartbreaking to realise that you’re exactly the same as you were, occupying that same exact position.”

She has journals filled with notes, she says, documents of her time there with friends and family – including some of Crying in H Mart’s most beloved characters, like her gentle cousin Seong Young and Aunt Nami who comforted her following her mother’s death – but the book is still in its beginning stages until she finds time to uncover its unifying arc.

For a songwriter whose songs are so poetic, more abstract than revelatory, it must be odd to have listeners looking for clues about the characters from her life in her songs. Little Girl, a lullaby of a song on the new album about a deadbeat dad who has lost touch with his daughter, immediately had me thinking it was about her own estranged father, who by the end of Crying in H Mart was self-medicating somewhere in Phuket. Zauner laughs.

“I mean, I hope so – I always did that with musicians I love,” she says, recalling listening to Cat Power’s Moon Pix as a teenager and being convinced each song was about Bill Callahan of Smog (the indie stars dated for a while in the late ’90s). “I think that’s a natural part of the medium. And I think sometimes people read into it things that aren’t there, but I like that, too.”

On the album’s closing track Magic Mountain, over John Cale-esque viola strums, Zauner sings about “playing king, playing bride … you and me, and soon ours”. Has she been thinking about family and kids? She nods. “I think I’m at that age, and it’s something that was on my mind a lot while writing this record – the possibility of that and how it would impact my work and how to make space for both things.”

As someone who wrote a bestselling memoir about her mother, about the bond and the challenge of that relationship, she must’ve thought often about the kind of mother she’d be: demanding and exacting, like she describes her mum in the book, or more free and easygoing? “I think a little of both,” Zauner says. “I hope to be a little bit more easygoing, but I can already see a lot of her tendencies in me.”

For now, those bigger rooms with their bigger crowds beckon – including gigs in Australia as part of Vivid in Sydney and Rising in Melbourne. For the first time since the job changed so irrevocably, Zauner says she’s feeling optimistic about bringing her music to the stage. “I had to do a reset over the last year. I think I lost a little bit of the joy of it because it became so serious and the stakes became so high. But I’m hoping this is the year where I feel more comfortable and I can have fun performing again.”

For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women) is out on March 21. Japanese Breakfast will perform at Vivid Live at the Sydney Opera House on June 3, and at Rising at PICA in Melbourne on June 5.

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