Michelle Zauner Is Challenging the ‘Sad Girl’ Label
Michelle Zauner wants to clear the air: Japanese Breakfast’s new album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), isn’t really about grappling with the weight of her recent success. While it’s an easy connection to make—this mellow collection of songs follows her triumphant album Jubilee and bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart—there’s more to it than that.
“I mean, it was an intense year for me and I’m really grateful for that time,” Zauner says via Zoom, reflecting on those back-to-back debuts in 2021. But although she has discussed the challenges of that success in her recent interviews, the songs “have nothing to do with that,” she stresses.
“If people lead with, ‘How were you feeling during that time?’ I was just speaking honestly,” Zauner says. “But I don’t want that to be the takeaway from this record. I don’t think that’s what this record is really about. That was just some of what I was going through at that time. Maybe it made its way in ways that I don’t realize, but I don’t think it did.”
Zauner is wearing a black long-sleeve shirt, seated on the floor in front of her sofa in her New York apartment. It’s the week after the album’s release, which she celebrated day-of by meeting fans for a signing at Rough Trade in Williamsburg. (“And I ordered two pasta entrées at a restaurant afterwards and had one glass of champagne,” she adds.) Behind her, a canary yellow wall speckled with framed artwork nearly glows in the early spring sunlight.
Regardless of what’s been said on the press tour, For Melancholy Brunettes has garnered overwhelming critical praise. It’s an early contender for one of the best releases this year with its sublime lyrics and delicate yet swelling arrangements. The album lives up to its name, with songs about wishing to be a happier woman, fearing the sudden death of your loved ones, stumbling into the arms of men in bars, and even succumbing to a siren’s song. “I really love the lyrics on this record,” Zauner says. “I think I’ve grown further as a writer and I enjoyed trusting myself to go to a place that was maybe a little bit less obvious.”
That’s partly thanks to her inspirations from Gothic art and literature, including Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Frankenstein. “I knew mostly just after Jubilee, I wanted a record with a darker palette both visually and sonically. And so I started reading books that were in that Gothic canon to put me in the headspace for that type of writing.” It wasn’t just books; her cinematic influences included Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, she told Letterboxd. The New York City Ballet’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the opera scene in Marie Antoinette, and other theatrical productions also informed the elaborate set design for Japanese Breakfast’s next tour, which kicks off later this month. Like the pieces it references, For Melancholy Brunettes is a romantic work of art.
And it isn’t the only thing Zauner’s been working on. She spent the last year in Seoul, immersing herself in Korean culture and learning the language of her homeland—a “profound experience” and “one of the best years of my life.” It also gave her material for her next book: She wrote 10 minutes a day in her diaries, in English on her laptop and in Korean by hand. She doesn’t hesitate to flip her notebook open and show me a page, revealing rows of characters written in pink ink with occasional, scattered scribbles. She’s already written 250,000 words through this routine. She plans to start weaving them into a narrative arc during her downtime on tour.
She has her hands in film too, having written original music for Celine Song’s next movie, Materialists, due out this summer. But as for the adaptation of Crying in H Mart, development “is on pause.” Zauner told Ssense earlier this year, “There were issues with the Hollywood strikes, and the director [Will Sharpe] stepped away from the project. I spent a year working on the screenplay, which was a tough but rewarding process. I still have faith it will get made someday, but it’s not happening anytime soon. Right now, I’m focusing on other creative projects, so the film will have to wait.”
In the meantime, she’s pursuing art “earnestly and honestly,” missing Seoul, challenging the “sad girl music” trope, and creating her own definition of success.
At this point, my creative work feels really in dialogue with itself. After two years of touring an album about joy, you want to express another side of yourself. It’s almost like my first two records were about grief in varying ways, and Jubilee was about giving myself permission to feel joy after that experience.
It’s been 10 years since my mom died and I released my first record [Psychopomp in 2016]. It feels like this is me returning to my normal state, honestly. I’m not a violently sad person, but I’m also melancholic about parts of life. I think that’s really normal. There’s something romantic about that condition and feeling, and that was the record that I really wanted to make because it felt honest to what I was going through and who I am as a person.
You said you’re “not a violently sad person.” Do you get the label of “sad girl music” a lot?I am thankfully discovering that maybe I’m slightly less online than I believed myself to be, but I don’t really know what that title triggered in people around certain online discourse. I think that they should read a book. I don’t know. I’ve always liked sad girl—and boy—music, but I think it’s pretty reductive if you were to call someone like Elliott Smith or Thom Yorke “sad boy music.” But that’s what that is. So if that’s what we want to call it, then that is the music for me. [Laughs]
My friend, Adam Kolodny, who is the DP in all of my music videos, was like, “This is the most you line.” [Laughs]
You directed a couple of your music videos, too. I really enjoyed the one for “Picture Window.” It feels like a film to me; I would watch a full-length version of that. It was inspired by your time in Korea, right?I knew I wanted to make at least a video where I wasn’t a major part of it. It’s hard to direct music videos because the time is so short and the budget is so small, and if you’re in it, it’s really hard to move seamlessly through the takes. A lot of the times when I’m editing, I am really self-conscious about the way that I look.
It was also a little bit intimidating for me because I’ve never made a music video with such a serious tone. Because the song is about being an anxious person in a relationship with someone whose death you’re constantly fearing, I liked the idea of this couple where the guy is really gung-ho about moving forward and the girlfriend has some reservations. … I wanted to really play with the left-to-right tracking as if they’re having what someone described as a “tug-of-war with time.” … It was really fun making that video.
Because I was shooting it in Korea and with a mostly all-Korean crew, it became kind of a love letter to my time there because everyone in the party scene is a friend of mine, and all the people I was working with were people that I had met during my time there. It was [set] in various neighborhoods that I had spent time in. There’s a shot where it’s just the buildings moving past—that’s kind of heartbreaking for me because the song is also just about the inability to stop time and your fear of it always moving away from you.
My second book is just about studying the Korean language, and I thought I was going to have tons of time to write, but my Korean level was much lower than I [thought]. I spent eight hours a day just studying the Korean language and going to school and doing my homework and only consuming Korean content. I wanted to see what happens if you dedicate an entire year to just one thing. Because so much of what I do as a musician and writer is so much other crap that isn’t actually what I want to do. Like social media or...no offense, interviews.
None taken.You have to do press, you have to do shows, you have to think about hiring people, you have to think about production, you have to answer questions about merch, you have to practice the guitar, you have to do vocal lessons, you have to write the songs, you have to record. There’s so many things that go into the machine of making and promoting music that it’s nice to just study Korean language. Just that. And seeing how your brain changes and how you improve.
So I just did that and I kept a diary for 10 minutes every single day, which seems very short, but I actually amassed 250,000 words of raw material. ... It was also fun to see how my Korean improved just in writing. I’m re-reading and starting to transcribe my Korean journals slowly, and it was interesting that already I can be like, “Oh, that’s the wrong grammar,” or “You misspelled that.”
Who needs Duolingo?No one needs Duolingo. It’s not a good way to learn a language. [Laughs]
I don’t know. I haven’t really started to write it. I think everyone wants to think that they’re funny. I’m sure it will present its own challenges. But similar to Melancholy coming after Jubilee, my writer self is interested in flexing a different part of my person and my work. And I think it’s more lighthearted fare. It’s really funny to be in your 30s in a class full of international K-pop fans in their 20s. And it’s really humbling, the kind of mistakes that you make in another language.
I think a lot of people are curious about what life is like if you live abroad for a year, if it’s even possible to learn a language in a year in your 30s, and what challenges are uniquely presented in older age. It’s going to be an interesting and fun book to write, and it will be a very different experience from Crying in H Mart, which was a massive emotional unearthing.
Was this trip to Korea the first time you went by yourself without family? I know you traveled there frequently when you were a kid.No, I played shows in Korea, and I did a summer language program when I was younger without my mom, who later joined me. This was just the longest time I’ve stayed in Korea.
I used to go to the Philippines, where my family is from, every other year growing up. I feel like it’s different going there with your family, where you’re in their bubble, than going yourself as an adult, where you create your own experience. I don’t know if that’s something that you felt at all.Oh, 100 percent. My aunt dropped me off in my neighborhood, Mangwon, at one point, and she was just like, “I’ve never been here.” My family sticks to their neighborhoods and their places and it would’ve been really funny to talk to my mom about all this, because she has her relationship to certain places. I remember my lighting designer was like, “Oh, we got to go to the lesbian bars while we’re in Korea.” And I was like, “I don’t think that they have that.” Of course they do, but I come from this childhood background where my mom would’ve never taken me there.
“I thought that the whole time I would just be thinking about my mom, but really, I think so much of the [next] book and my experience is about finding what that country is for me, what my version of that is.”
It was really cool to get to know the indie scene and the alternative community and the queer community while I was there, these parts of Korea that maybe I was not exposed to but are interesting to me. I thought that the whole time I would just be thinking about my mom, but really, I think so much of the book and my experience is about finding what that country is for me, what my version of that is. I was really nervous that it was going to be really lonely and really boring and hard for me to connect with people, but I actually found it to be the total opposite.
Would you ever go back and live there part-time?[Nods] In a heartbeat. I miss it all the time.
You wrote music for Celine Song’s Materialists. What was it like working with her on that project?My manager said that there were a few people in the running to submit songs for her new movie and if I was interested. I really admire her and loved Past Lives. And so I watched a screener and loved it. She wanted something that was like John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves”—I wanted to do a more upbeat version of that. It’s very inspired by the movie. I really got a lot of liberty.
I rarely have the time to do stuff like that, so it was really fun to write something to contribute to someone else’s work, and especially someone like Celine who I think is so brilliant and special. It was really fun. And when I had a meeting with her, I just fell head over heels for her, so I really wanted her to like it and was very glad that she did too.
I have to clarify. This is the first time in my life that I’ve done promo for the record, and every single journalist has been like, “How do you feel after all the success that you have?” Every single interview I’ve done has led with that as a major question. And because I’m not media trained, I’ve just been like, “Oh, it’s amazing. It’s great. But there were parts of it that were really challenging.” But I wouldn’t say this record is hugely inspired by that. I’m sure that it made its way into the record. “Here Is Someone,” for instance, is about me preparing to take a year-long break and tell the band that that’s what I need to do. But beyond that, there are no other songs that are about that experience!
“This is not a record about grappling with the perils of fame. I feel like it’s sort of unfairly become the mass narrative of this record.”
This is not a record about grappling with the perils of fame. I feel like it’s sort of unfairly become the mass narrative of this record. I don’t think that that’s what this is about. I think it’s a record about feeling melancholic about time, and the passing of it, and how that impacts me both in my work and on tour and in my personal life and looking towards the future.
So how do you define success? What does that look like for you?I don’t know. I feel like I’ve accomplished really everything that I’ve wanted to, in terms of recognition and financial security and being able to support myself with my work. I feel really lucky that I’m in that place, and I feel very successful in that regard. I think success is me being able to just continue to pursue art earnestly and honestly and not being lured to make something that I think is going to have mass appeal and is uninteresting to me or dishonest.
Honestly, I think that the success I experienced in the last few years really allowed me to be like, “If that’s it, that’s fine. I just want to make something that’s interesting to me and is exactly what I want to make. And if people don’t get it, then they don’t get it.” If anything, it just gave me the courage to make a real artsy record.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
elle
