Japanese Breakfast
⤏ MICHELLE ZAUNER IN CONVERSATION WITH MISHA SCOTT
⤏ PHOTOS BY JACKIE LEE YOUNG | HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY GABBY ROSENBERG
⤏ PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2018
This summer, I made the trip from Los Angeles to Eugene, Oregon to visit my godmother for the last time. It was a visit I had worked very hard to prepare myself for. I had been going to therapy, journaling, staying busy. Letting the grief in a little at a time, like drops through an IV. Inoculating myself, I believed, against the blinding loss I knew was coming. But of course, I was not prepared.
I’d always associated my godmother with the white musk oil she always wore, but no matter how much of it I rubbed into her wrists I couldn’t dispel the rotten air hanging close to her skin. I wasn’t prepared for that. And I was not prepared for the hospice bed frame numbered in Sharpie: 1003. Wondering in those blurry, silent hours how many of these beds were dispatched in the square miles surrounding us.
I thought a lot about this when I came upon Michelle Zauner’s “Crying In H Mart” in The New Yorker, a sharply affecting meditation on the loss of her mother (who, I discovered with a pang, had also lived in Eugene). The essay was published one year after Zauner’s band, Japanese Breakfast, released their sophomore album, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, which examined the same tragedy through the heady darkness of synths and simile. At a certain point grief becomes so big that no single medium can contain its expression. I wondered, not for the first time, how many words it might take, or how many songs. I’ve always believed in the miracle of art. I hoped that Zauner had felt as healed writing the essay as I had felt in reading it.
When I call Michelle she is in Philadelphia, home after a long stint of touring. I can hear her on the other end preparing breakfast while she talks about her seemingly endless creative endeavors, one of which is a forthcoming memoir on the loss of her mother. I’m a little nervous to ask about grief and the role it plays in her creative process, but she is open and thoughtful.
MISHA SCOTT: I wanted to talk to you about “Crying In H Mart” and this new book you’re working on. What made you decide to take on grief through a new medium?
MICHELLE ZAUNER: I’ve been writing music for so long — since I was 16 — so for about 13 years now. It’s a medium that I feel so comfortable with that it can sometimes feel like I’m not progressing anymore. You know, you hide behind so much musically and it’s not really the whole story. It’s a lot of metaphor, and feeling, and small observations. I think that I just have so much more to say.
When I wrote The New Yorker piece, I really couldn’t remember [my mom] before she was sick because I hadn’t lived at home since I was 18. So I just only had these really painful, traumatic, and sad memories of my mom struggling with illness, and it made me so sad that I couldn’t remember our relationship before that happened. This experience of writing in longer form has helped me really dig in deeper, because there’s nothing else to hide behind.
And after finishing our second record I definitely felt this pressure. Like, you wrote two grief records, it’s time to explore new topics. But that’s my mom. I’ll never get over it. I’ll never not think about it. It will never not be one of the most major traumas in my life. Writing this book makes me feel like I can maybe say all the things that I have left to say that I didn’t get to.
MS: It’s hard to compare, I guess, writing essays versus writing music, but do you find that emotionally it’s tougher to do one or the other when you’re processing this grief?
MZ: It’s a hundred times harder to write the longer pieces of nonfiction. People ask me all the time, like, how do you sing these songs that are so personal to you and really heartbreaking? And I think a large part of it is because there’s so much going on. It’s definitely harder to play some of these songs acoustic than when we play it as a full band because there’s just such a huge arrangement on all of the songs and a lot of the songs sound so happy. “In Heaven” is a pop song that’s pretty fast paced and has a lot going on instrumentally, but it’s about watching my dog be confused about her owner being gone. Watching my dog register grief. I really like to do that in my music, create that juxtaposition, but it also helps to be able to perform the songs because they don’t sound sad a lot of the time.
MS: Are there other non-musical creative modes that you’re interested in exploring as well?
MZ: I have a lot of little projects. I am working on a soundtrack for an indie [video] game — and producing it — called Sable. And then I am working on a music video for another artist that is shooting in November. I’ve always been someone that has flitted in and out of a very depressive state, so when something really traumatic happened in my life I was in constant fear and swimming away from that. I just needed to compartmentalize it, to explore it in art, and work really hard on various mediums. All the activities that I’ve been involved in seem like they really run the gamut, but I think that my interest in all of them really boil down to this sense of storytelling. I’m drawn to narrative and it’s always something that I want to create in whatever medium. I hope at this point I’m just satisfied with what I’ve taken on and can grow those things. I don’t want to spread myself too thin. But if all my artistic endeavors fail I’ll start, like, a Korean noodle shop or something.
“I've always been someone that has flitted in and out of a very depressive state.”
MS: Soft Sounds was a departure in a lot of ways from your first record, Psychopomp. Do you envision the next album to be an equally dramatic evolution?
MZ: My plan with the next record is to kind of just do the same thing when I went in to make Soft Sounds From Another Planet, which is just, you know, don’t think about it. Just go into the studio and play and make what is exciting to you. And I think that’s what people want to hear, anyway. I think people can really sniff it out, when you’re trying to pander to what you think the market wants. I don’t think anyone enjoys that besides, like, the algorithm or whatever.
MS: One thing that seems really difficult about art in the shadow of the Trump administration is the pressure to make things that are really intensely authentic and personal, but which also speak to much broader issues, and to use your platform as an artist to call others to action. How do you navigate that?
MZ: I’ve never really made music that’s extremely political. There were some very small lines on Soft
Sounds that kind of hints at that fear and that impending doom. I definitely thought of [Trump] when I wrote the line, “And the cruel men always win until death.” But it’s something that I grapple with every day, like, “How can I use my platform to address this?” I frequently find myself talking in circles. I really wanted to, like, light a MAGA hat on fire, but I don’t really have an answer. It always winds up like, “We need to love each other.” But I feel so stupid saying that. I think it’s so much more than, “We need to love each other.”
MS: You mentioned that people ask you how you go onstage and sing such personal songs, but you’re also very open about revisiting those personal topics in interviews and with fans, which I imagine is its own challenge, separate from the performing.
MZ: I think in the beginning it was therapeutic sometimes. I mean, what is therapy? A lot of therapy is just asking questions about how you feel and what made you do something. So doing interviews was sort of a funny way of interacting with that experience. And it makes me feel like my work has meaning, that it touches people, and people can relate to it. I’m really not a very private person. I’ve always been pretty open about my grief and people have shared that that has helped them through their own experiences, so I do value that. It makes me feel like I have a meaningful place.
⤏ BUY THE PRINT EDITION OF JR HI THE MAGAZINE | ISSUE 004 AND A LIMITED EDITION JAPANESE BREAKFAST TRADING CARD HERE.
⤏ MISHA SCOTT (SHE/HER) IS A WRITER, FILMMAKER, AND RECENT LA-TO-NEW YORK TRANSPLANT. SHE SPENDS MOST OF HER FREE TIME RUNNING A BLOG FOR MUSIC AND CREATIVE WRITING CALLED HULLABALOO AND THE REST OF IT REWATCHING EPISODES OF FLEABAG. YOU CAN FIND MORE OF HER WRITING IN GOLD FLAKE PAINT, FIVE-2-ONE MAG, AND SLUTEVER. SHE HAS AN ON-AGAIN, OFF-AGAIN RELATIONSHIP WITH TWITTER AT @MISHADAVIA.