Japanese Breakfast’s last album, Jubilee, catapulted the band to an entirely new level of fame. They were sold out theaters around the world, scored two Grammy nominations and landed on tons of year-end lists that celebrated the LP’s buoyant, joyful sound.
But that kind of notoriety took a toll on frontwoman Michelle Zauner, whose profile had also been raised by the 2021 publication of her bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart. “For the past 10 years, I’ve really, really leaned into my work as a way to keep myself grounded, and sometimes you can do that too much,” Zauner, 35, exclusively told Us Weekly. “I had lost a lot of friends, I had friends die that year. Me and my bandmates had to miss a lot of important family stuff — every wedding, birthday, our friends’ lives going on without us.”
Zauner isn’t complaining about that success, but she knew that she wanted her conflicted feelings to inform Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women), which dropped Friday, March 21.
“Part of that was so fun,” she recalled of the post-Jubilee years. “You get to tour the world, you get to do what you love, but then there’s another part that’s kind of sad, you know? I was just realizing after 10 years of doing this really intensely [that] I’m in my mid-30s and I wanna have a family someday. I was trying to figure out how I was gonna unwire myself from that machine and find some more balance in my life.”
While Jubilee superfans may be surprised to hear such a major tonal shift on For Melancholy Brunettes, Zauner says that her new songs are actually more in line with her default attitude toward life.
“Jubilee was sort of a response to feeling like I was always writing and performing about grief and giving myself permission to move on and experience joy,” she explained. “In a way, melancholy is my natural state and was something that I was returning to. If I look at my life within the 10 years after my mom passed away, I think it’s interesting to go from records about raw grief and disassociating to then giving myself permission to feel joy, to now giving myself permission to feel melancholic about different things in my life. I wanted to explore a darker palette, and it felt fitting for what I was going through in my life.”
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Zauner also looked to books and art for inspiration while working on For Melancholy Brunettes, including Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. It might sound unusual to mine literature and visual art for ideas while writing songs, but Zauner prefers it to listening to more music, lest someone else’s sound leak into her own work.
“It’s really interesting because I wrote a book as well, and when I wrote that book, I read a lot,” she told Us. “If I needed to describe a rainy day, I would go read a Marilynne Robinson book or a Richard Ford book and read surgically exactly how they were talking about the weather. But when it comes to music, I tend to not do that because I’m so worried about accidentally copying something or being too influenced by it.”
Some of the seeds of For Melancholy Brunettes were planted during the Jubilee album cycle, which took Japanese Breakfast to Europe — the perfect place to go if you love classic literature and art.
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“We were going to museums on off days, and I really love reading the titles of paintings and then also, obviously, looking at them,” she said with a laugh. “That must have really impacted me, because there’s a lot of references to Greek mythology [on the album], and I was just thinking a lot about different paintings that I had seen that had stuck with me, or I would jot down in a notebook the title of a painting.”
She was struck in particular by Jusepe de Ribera’s paintings of the four Furies, two of which are housed at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. (The other two are lost.)
“[I was] wanting to know more about the four Furies, learning about the punishments of these men and what they had done wrong and how gruesome they were, and sort of, like, metal and cool,” Zauner recalled. “That was a strange, subconscious fixation I had. I was really fascinated by mythology and all these stories about gods that are incredibly flawed and toxic and terrible people. When you think about gods, you think about supreme holiness and great good, something to aspire to. And yet all of these stories are about these gods that are horribly jealous and terribly cruel, abusing their power to take advantage of people and each other.”
Zauner wove these stories throughout For Melancholy Brunettes, the title of which is taken from the song “Orlando in Love.”
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“[The songs are] all these episodic character studies of people that are thinking about their regrets or who have sacrificed something that has resulted in a consequence,” she explained. “I don’t think that it’s necessarily a moral tale, but it’s kind of a presentation of these crossroads in our lives, and if you take a path too far or succumb to some kind of temptation, what could follow?”
All this mythological death and destruction might sound heavy, like the success of Jubilee was weighing on Zauner, but she says the opposite is true.
“In a way, I felt freed from that because I didn’t necessarily want [my music] to get any bigger,” she told Us. “I don’t wanna self-sabotage that by any means, but at this point in my career, I’m pretty happy if this is as big as it gets. It feels very big to me, and I just wanted to make a real artist record. I wanted to pursue the kind of music that I was interested in making and came to me naturally. Honestly, I think that’s the only thing I really have control over and is what I hope other people want from you. I never wanted to make something that felt like I was trying to reach more people. I feel like people can tell when you’re trying to do that. And the best thing that one can do in that situation anyway is to just pursue something honestly.”
For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women) is out now.
