Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner is Inspired by Melancholy Women and Angry Men

The music of Japanese Breakfast builds worlds upon lush and deeply felt emotion, from the all-encompassing grief and longing of their 2016 debut, Psychopomp, to the euphoria of 2021’s Jubilee. On the band’s new record, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), lead singer and songwriter Michelle Zauner embraces a different kind of sadness.

“I feel like I’m not filled with an intense, violent sadness over a breakup or longing for someone or even a death,” Zauner tells the Observer. “But I feel a general melancholy as time passes. ... As you get older, it’s a feeling that overtakes you. A lot of the record is concerned with the anticipatory grief of lives that you’ll never live, passing by.”

Zauner turns to art and fiction to inspire and inhabit this world of hypothetical lives. Films like Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Sally Potter’s Orlando influenced the narrative and aesthetic directions of the album, as did Jusepe de Rivera paintings she saw while touring Europe.

But Zauner, who is also the bestselling author of Crying in H-Mart, cites literature as her main inspiration for Melancholy Brunettes.

“The title comes from a John Cheever book of short fiction called World of Apples, and that made its way into quite a few songs,” she explains. “I read [Thomas Mann’s] The Magic Mountain, which is also the title of the last track on the record, and that was a very influential book for me. ..] That character is one of my favorite literary protagonists of all time. He’s this very impressionable, romantic and foolish young man who visits his cousin in a sanatorium and ends up staying there for seven years. The way Mann treats him is both endearing and cruel. I think that was how I sort of approached my own avatar for this record.”

Zauner’s also been into books that she describes as the “incel canon.” Incel, short for involuntary celibacy, has become a catch-all term for angry, violent young men who have been radicalized by misogynistic online content. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace are unwitting examples of books she has cited that have resonated with this movement.

“I’m really fascinated by our current conundrum,” she says of the incel phenomenon. “I’m interested in where boyhood gets dark, and I’ve always enjoyed this type of art that’s revered by this community that hates me.”

Zauner has a history of gender bending the characters in her sonic worlds, and the new record is no exception. The first single, “Orlando in Love,” and its accompanying music video tell the story of a man yearning for a siren. Zauner casts herself in the male lead.
“I’ve done this since I was very young and I’ve always liked this kind of art,” she says of her penchant for androgyny. “I’ve always been fascinated by this masculine sort of art.”

Another cut from the album, “Mega Circuit,” faces the issue of incels head-on and tries to look inside “the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded.” Her approach to this narrative is primarily curious and even empathetic.

“I think it’s really interesting that we’re maybe more similar than we think in our outsider tendencies,” Zauner muses. “How do I approach this community that despises me with compassion and love to not feel that way and want to inflict violence on me?”

The artistic consideration put into For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) will be matched in its supporting tour, which comes through Dallas on April 24. Fans will be treated to a theatrical experience that brings the world of Orlando and the “incel eunechs” to life.

“It’s not something we’ve ever done before,” Zauner says. “We put a lot of attention into the stage design and how we interact. There are moments that almost feel like a play that I think will be very interesting.”

Japanese Breakfast's Melancholy Tour is coming to South Side Ballroom on April 24. More information and tickets can be found on Ticketmaster.