On the cover of Japanese Breakfast’s new album, For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women), the band’s frontwoman, Michelle Zauner, is pictured face down on a wooden table, surrounded by an eclectic feast, flowers, a candlestick, and a human skull. The scene conjures images of 19th-century still-life paintings—moody and heavy with chiaroscuro—save for the woman at its center, who, faceless and dour, seems an apt metaphor for the emotional landscape of fed-up women throughout history.
Out March 21, For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women) is a sharp departure from the band’s 2021 release, Jubilee, which propelled Japanese Breakfast to new echelons of success with its upbeat, effervescent indie-pop energy that earned the band two Grammy nominations in 2022. Released just two months after the publication of Zauner’s best-selling memoir, Crying in H Mart—which explored her Korean American identity and complicated relationship with her late mother, who died in 2014—Jubilee was a celebration: of life, of joy, and of coming up for air after years drowning in grief. But this instant and widespread success took a toll on Zauner, who quickly became completely consumed by her work. She was touring all the time, her health was starting to decline, and harmony between the personal and professional was lacking.
For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women) was written during that juncture in Zauner’s life and inspired by the myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. Literature and art from the 18th and 19th century were also wells of creative inspiration for Zauner, who looked to paintings by the likes of Caspar Friedrich and texts by the Brontë sisters to develop the album’s visual and literal language. Zauner’s lyrics throughout the album tell stories predominantly rooted in fiction but with whispers of truth about Zauner’s own life. They touch on everything from lust and desire to unfaithful men and artistic narcissism and are layered over intricate guitar riffs and lush orchestral arrangements.
After recording the bulk of the album in December 2023, Zauner moved to South Korea for a year. She took language classes and journaled about her experience—pages that she reveals are the blueprint of her next book.
Bazaar recently connected with Zauner to discuss all things For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women) and what we can expect from her second literary release.
You’ve said that certain works by a number of authors and artists influenced this album. Walk me through them. What drew you in?
There are a bunch of paintings of women, in particular Degas’s L’Absinthe, that feature melancholic women in cafés. I think I saw an image of a woman face down on a table, and then I discovered that that was a kind of trope in 20th-century painting, so I found all these images of women, largely brunettes, that showed melancholy in this way and began collecting them as references. I knew that I wanted the cover of the album to not have my face on it, and I thought a really creative way to do that while still being present was to have my head face down on a table.
All of the objects [around me] were imbued with meaning from different parts of the album’s lyrics. So there’s a bowl of liver, in reference to a line on “Here Is Someone” that says, “I run my guts back through the spoke.” There are a bunch of oysters to reference Venus [on the] shell [in Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus painting]. There are flowers in a vase in reference to a line from “Winter in L.A.” There’s a Gordian knot baked onto the pie in reference to “Leda.” There is honey water. [In terms of] Caspar Friedrich, I just loved his painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. It was really inspirational for [the track] “Orlando in Love”; that was the seascape I imagined Orlando living beside. And then I was reading both Jane Eyre [by Charlotte Brontë] and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë in 2022. I became really interested in Gothic literature. I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and I really loved that palette. I felt like making a darker but romantic album would be a nice juxtaposition to the work that I made before.
You mentioned “Orlando in Love.” I want to talk about what that song is about, because the video for it is so beautiful.
To me, it’s a very literal story of a foolish romantic man who lives by the sea in Winnebago who hears a siren call and follows it to his watery death. I wanted the music video to reflect that in a very literal way, where this daydreaming friar runs to the sea because he has this dream about a beautiful siren looking like Venus in a shell. I think if I were to map that onto my life in any way and [dissect] where that came from, it’s about the call of ambition and the dangers of following it blindly to the end.
You directed the music video for “Orlando in Love,” which was partially filmed in Seoul and partially filmed at your alma mater, Bryn Mawr. That seems complicated; why the two locations?
I originally was just going to shoot it in the U.S. My college is very famously beautiful and ancient looking. I went to college in a castle basically, and I knew I wanted to shoot the video at [Bryn Mawr’s] cloisters because it would read as an abbey. I just loved the idea of dressing up as friars with my friends and running around with them in this weird castle. I had worked with such an amazing team on the album cover, so the production design and the makeup artist and the hair artists and the producers were just so fantastic. Ultimately, the most important thing was that I thought my friend [the Korean bassist] Jungle would be the most incredible Venus de Milo siren. The two of us hung out a lot while I was living in Korea, and she has so many great ideas about creative direction and styling. So that’s why the video is sort of split. That was maybe not the greatest idea from a financial standpoint, but it’s maybe my favorite video I’ve ever made.
Speaking of Seoul, what was the main impetus behind going there for an extended period?
After Crying in H Mart, my publisher said that they would take whatever second book I wanted to write. And for a long time, I loved the idea [of going to South Korea]. When I was younger, my mom always said to me, “You would be fluent in Korean if you lived there for a year.” I wanted to learn Korean so badly to communicate with my aunt and talk about my mother and feel closer to her. I don’t speak another language, and it’s such a deep shame that I have and a great regret that I never learned Korean. I just wanted to dedicate my life to one thing and see, like, how far I could get with it and document that process. It was such a privilege to get to live there and clearly what I needed in more ways than I could have even imagined.
What did your life look like there? What was your day-to-day?
I went to various language schools five days a week for four hours a day. I only watched Korean content. I only listened to Korean music. I tried to only speak in Korean. I saw my aunt probably once a month, which was so wonderful, and I got to slowly have deeper and deeper conversations with her over the course of the year. As my language skills got better, I got to live in the present in a really wonderful way. So much of my life for the past three years had been imagining a calendar weeks ahead: flying to this place, playing this show, prepping for this interview, writing for this thing. It was so nice to hang out with the same people, be a local at a bar, go to school, do my homework, see a tutor. It was the best year of my life.
I have to ask about the food. What were some of your favorite things to eat?
So, I lived in Mangwon, which is kind of like the Greenpoint [Brooklyn neighborhood] of Korea, and there’s a really wonderful outdoor market called Mangwon Shijang that has all sorts of street food and produce and fresh fish. There’s one stall that sold fresh rice cakes. I would go there almost every day and get garae-tteok, which is a big cylindrical rice cake that’s plain and chewy. I would pop it in the air fryer so it was really crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside, and then I would dip it into sesame oil and salt. It’s so savory and delicious, and the texture is amazing. There is a dak-galbi place, which is spicy Korean barbecue chicken with rice cakes and cabbage and vegetables mixed in, and they dump a bunch of cheese in the middle. I would go there a lot with a big group of people and drink a lot of beer. And, like, eat Korean barbecue. I ate that a lot. And then dangmyeon naengmyeon, which is this cold beef broth noodle dish that’s very, very bland but very, very hearty. Eating that in the summer was really delightful. The food there is so good, and I miss it terribly.
Were you writing bits of your book while you were there?
I thought that I would be so bored and write so much. I wrote in my diary for 10 minutes every day, which doesn’t seem like much, but I also did that the year before, and now I have about 500,000 words to go through. It’s a lot of messy thoughts, but if I can get into some normal [routine] on tour, I’ll start looking at that material and finding the arc of the story and start putting it together.
So the book is about that year in Korea. What does life look like abroad? If you challenge yourself to learn a language for one year, how far can you get? Is 35 too old to learn a language? I want to explore all these kinds of questions. And also, just the funny anecdotes that come with being in your 30s with a class of 20-year-olds. Going back to school at that age is so funny. And also, no one knows who you are. There’s always this fantasy that you have of going back to school and being like, “Oh, if I knew then what I know now…” or “If I dressed the way that I do now…” then everyone’s going to be obsessed with me. But they’re not, is the sad reality. It’s just a humbling and funny experience in that way. So I think [my second book] will be fun, more lighthearted, and very charming.
You’re going on tour later this year to in support of For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women). What will the aesthetic vibe be?
Because the record is just so analog, I really wanted to have a production that felt almost like a play or a ballet. I want to use lighting to make it feel like you’re watching not just a concert, but some kind of, like, theatrical performance. I’ve worked with my lighting designer Kat Borderud to make something really special, to bring out that feeling. A lot of the venues that I’ve chosen for this tour feel a little bit more intimate; they’re more like theaters. I was really inspired by what Björk did on her Vespertine tour, where everything was very considered, down to the event spaces she played in. I’m feeling very positive about this tour and very excited about it.
