JAPANESE BREAKFAST INTERVIEWED (2025): The woman who fell to Earth

Few touring musicians would have quite the reading list of Michelle Zauner. But there aren't many like the 36-year old Korean-American of the band Japanese Breakfast.

“I'm reading a great book by Jhumpa Lahiri called In Other Words: A Memoir which is about her living in Italy and learning the Italian language,” she says, “and I just read Eve Babitz' Slow Days, Fast Company. Before that it was David Foster Wallace's essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

“I'm working on my second book about my year abroad in Korea last year so I'm specifically reading a lot of non-fiction.”

With her 2018 New Yorker essay Crying in H Mart leading to a book deal for her 2021 best-selling memoir of the same title, five Japanese Breakfast albums behind her (including 2021's Grammy-nominated Jubilee), a soundtrack for the video game Sable, directing innovative videos for her band and other artists, and being named in 2022 by Time magazine as one of 100 important innovators, Zauner is an uncommon figure in contemporary music.

Given all that and the attention she also gives to Japanese Breakfast's stage presentation, is it a stretch to mention David Bowie?

She doesn't flinch: “He's certainly someone who put detail and thought into his work, from the outfits he wore to the context which he put around an album.

“As [my career] got bigger and bigger it afforded me the opportunity to take my creativity and apply it to every single part of the project and the show, even down to the guitar picks and straps we use, the pre-show playlist, the walk-on music, what we wear . . .

“I'm trying my best to pay attention to the detail and showing people who turn up for us that we really care about everything.”

An Auckland audience will get to see Japanese Breakfast in June on the back of their most recent album For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women), described as “the accessible introduction to the kaleidoscopic career of Michelle Zauner” in these pages in March.

After two Japanese Breakfast albums finding her footing as she dealt with her mother's 2014 death from cancer and the joyous breakthrough Jubilee, this new album was recorded in the famous Sound City studios in Los Angeles with go-to producer Blake Mills.

The mythology of the place – Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and others recorded there – brought its own resonance: “Musicians have a firm belief in that kind of stuff”.

But Zauner is also pragmatic: “It felt special after all those years in . . .

.

You can read the rest of this lengthy and interesting interview at the Listener website here

Japanese Breakfast appear in the Auckland Winter Series, Auckland Town Hall, June 7

There is a review of the recent album For Melancholy Women (And Sad Brunettes) at Elsewhere here.