As a longtime Japanese Breakfast fan, I feel some undue pride in Michelle Zauner for bursting so brilliantly into the mainstream cultural consciousness. Her memoir Crying in H Mart, adapted from her New Yorker article of the same name, has been so popular that it was optioned for a film my MGM. Jubilee (2021) has charted on Emerging Artists and Vinyl Record Sales charts, as well as landing her at #56 on the Billboard 200. Her soundtrack work for the indie game Sable has received praise from multiple publications and it’s not even out yet. Her self-directed music videos for Jubilee singles “Be Sweet,” “Posing in Bondage,” and “Savage Good Boy” were all brilliant additions to her already substantial directing portfolio. In short, Michelle Zauner is killing it.
As her memoir reveals, the years preceding this wave of creative successes weren’t easy ones; she nearly gave up on music, lived paycheck to paycheck, and suffered the decline and death of her mother. Her first two records, written in the thick of these events, are achingly beautiful and incredibly sad. While they were indie favorites, it was Jubilee that landed her spots on late night TV and interviews with her idols. The attention is absolutely merited; this album features a few of my favorite Japanese Breakfast songs to date.
I pre-ordered the yellow swirl vinyl of Jubilee back when the record was first announced. It arrived a few days before the official release of the record, and I devoured the ten songs, trying to pick out standout tracks (futile exercise—it’s all perfect). The album continues to surprise me with songs I didn’t immediately clock as favorites. My favorite right now is “In Hell,” a song that revisits the death of Zauner’s mother and which I like to think is a partner piece to “In Heaven,” off Psychopomp (2016).
Although it’s explicitly about death, “In Hell” has a mutable quality in its kinetic, desperate lyrics:
Hell is finding someone to love
And I can't have you
Part of the charm of Japanese Breakfast is Michelle Zauner’s distinct voice. It’s clear, piercing even—the delivery of “In Hell,” as with any Japanese Breakfast song, feels like it’s about to spill over. As an artist so previously rooted in mourning, these performances have always felt replete with grief and sadness. But in tracks like “Be Sweet” and “Paprika,” the cutting nature of her vocal quality is retooled to convey effervescent joy.
I, like just about everyone else who thinks about Lorde daily, was knocked out by the unlikely one-two punch of “Solar Power” and “Blouse.” Lorde came back blazing, and her “gorgeous, sun-kissed rebirth” was accompanied by her understated contribution to Clairo’s newest single. I’ve raised this point many times with many people, but I’ll put it in writing here: I can’t hear Lorde on “Blouse.” More troubling still, I can’t hear Clairo or Phoebe Bridgers on “Solar Power.” While I’ll save my real thoughts on “Solar Power” for another issue, I’ll just say that I’m still grappling with the image of Lorde and Clairo working together, especially on a song like “Blouse.”
It won recognition from many mainstream and indie artists. My favorite, from Palehound:
“Blouse” describes with a few biting details a routine encounter with sexualization in the workplace. The most viscerally painful line is one of desperation, resignation:
If touch could make them hear, then touch me now
Her performance of this song on late night TV is unlike so many that I’ve seen recently; Phoebe Bridgers smashed her guitar, Olivia Rodrigo milked the pop-punk princess aesthetic, WILLOW utilized strobe lights, graphic eyeliner, and a ripping guitar solo. Clairo did the whole song completely deadpan and played guitar. There was no band and no lights. She let the song speak for itself, and it was loud.
I attended my first post-pandemic show last week in Brooklyn. Saturday morning I was sitting on the couch googling “concerts brooklyn tonight” and that evening I was standing in the front row of a crowd on the roof of the Turk’s Inn singing “Cool Dry Place” with and at Katy Kirby. It was the perfect reintroduction into live music to see an indie artist play straight through their whole quarantine record. She played the album stripped down, reimagined for a live setting, with her two producers. It was her first show back too, and we all talked afterward about how special it all was, the intimacy of the venue, the format of the set, the quiet optimism of it all.
It felt more like waking up from a strange dream than the anxiety-ridden public health offense that I expected, and since then I’ve purchased tickets for six more shows in the next couple of months. Live music does something to me that nothing else does, puts a goofy grin on my face that I don’t even bother to fight anymore. I’m so grateful that I got to see that show, even if this period of relative normalcy doesn’t hold. I’ll have that memory forever, of the kinetic energy of that crowd on the roof, singing together.
Nice substack. Found it via writer office hours and subscribed. Being in the high pressure trading world, music suggestions may be just what I need :)