Michelle Zauner is having a moment. As the woman behind indie rock and electronic project Japanese Breakfast, she’s recently collaborated with Bay Area producer Giraffage and enjoyed critical praise for her two latest full-length efforts.
But it wasn’t that long ago that Zauner was ready to leave music behind. It took a tumultuous and traumatic episode—the death of her mother—for the singer and songwriter to find her voice.
In losing her mother, Zauner found strength and purpose in unspeakable loss, reinventing herself as Japanese Breakfast and taking the music press by storm with a pair of acclaimed records—2016’s Psychopomp and 2017’s Soft Sounds From Another Planet.
“It kinda took me giving up on it to realize how much I was meant to do it, I guess,” Zauner says over the phone.
Years before performing as Japanese Breakfast, Zauner had been leading the Philadelphia rock outfit Little Big League.
At the time, the band had been touring on their own, and just barely making enough from shows and merch to break even at the end of the day. It got to a point where she just wanted the security of a 9-to-5 job. And her mother was diagnosed with cancer.
“My mom was going through chemo and my bass player quit the band to be in another band,” Zauner says. “So the idea of going back to the same life of DIY touring, sleeping on people’s couches and floors, working as a waitress, quitting my job to go out and tour, then coming back and looking for a new job just seemed too hard.”
However, in the end, it was her mother’s illness that became the catalyst for Zauner to pursue music on her own terms. Psychopomp, her debut full-length as Japanese Breakfast, documents the months following her mother’s death.
On a late album highlight, “Heft,” Zauner confronts the reality of her loss, along with her own fears of dying too soon, teeth bared. Rising through spiraling guitars and a tunnel of reverb, her soaring vocals finally alight as she settles on the chorus “What if it’s the same dark coming?” she asks defiantly. “The same dark… Well then, fuck it all.”
By the time she put out Psychopomp, Zauner had already been writing for years. She began learning to play her first instrument when she was a child. “I started playing piano when I was 5. I hated music theory and practicing and stuff,” she says. “But I’m glad I was forced to now.”
Her mom wouldn’t buy her a guitar until she was a teenager. Even after she did get one, Zauner says her sights were not immediately set on writing her own songs. That last push would come about halfway through high school.
“The biggest thing for me was seeing my peers writing their own music,” she says. “I was a sophomore and ran into three seniors who I recognized from my school putting on a small show of songs they had written. It made it seem more in the realm of something I could do. Sometimes music that’s not as complex almost makes it seem more reachable.”
Her sophomore LP, Soft Sounds from Another Planet finds Zauner in a new place, albeit with a lot of the same things on her mind.
With album closer “This House,” Zauner reflects on how much the last two years have changed her atop a sparse instrumental of equal parts piano and confidently strummed guitar. She sings to a husband who helped pull her through the worst of it before thinking back on a toxic past relationship that would have only made things worse.
Considering the subject matter of Zauner’s new music, it’s no surprise that much of the conversation leads back to her mother.
“For the next album I would love to write about something else,” she says with a laugh. Whether she does, though, it’s clear that Zauner isn’t prone to shy away from talking about her loss.
“I think it just depends on how it’s handled,” she says. “For me it’s just a reality that a lot of the songs are about that. And it’s a huge part of my life. I guess there are times when people forget that I’m a human being and are rude about how they ask about it. But mostly, I think it helps me to talk about it, in a way, and I know it’s helped other people.”
Zauner is currently touring in support of Soft Sounds from Another Planet. She performs at The Ritz as part of the Noise Pop festival with support from Oakland-based Jay Som and Hand Habits.
Japanese Breakfast
Feb 21, 7pm, $15+
The Ritz, San Jose
theritzsanjose.com
