{"id":2232,"date":"2025-03-20T15:36:28","date_gmt":"2025-03-20T16:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/?p=2232"},"modified":"2025-03-20T18:28:52","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T18:28:52","slug":"japanese-breakfast-climbs-the-magic-mountain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/20\/japanese-breakfast-climbs-the-magic-mountain\/","title":{"rendered":"Japanese Breakfast Climbs the Magic Mountain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/assets.rebelmouse.io\/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy81ODM2ODIxOS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTc3NDYxNjI1NH0.aolqn_ItU_X__JHkAXD7anYog-J6pywc5_FYw37iIf4\/img.jpg?width=2000&amp;height=1500&amp;coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0\"><\/p>\n<p class=\"\">On Michelle Zauner\u2019s advice, I read Thomas Mann\u2019s <em><em>The Magic Mountain<\/em><\/em> on the six-hour flight from New York to LA. During our Zoom interview, we discussed the book\u2019s cult appeal and why <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/jbrekkie\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Japanese Breakfast<\/a> took a hiatus after the massive success of <em><em>Jubilee<\/em><\/em> and her hit memoir <em><em>Crying in H Mart<\/em><\/em>. The two projects balanced one another out: a boisterous yellow-tinged album, and a personal tale of food and grief. The singer-songwriter\u2019s third record, <em><em>For Melancholy Brunettes &amp; sad women<\/em><\/em>, is a sobering follow-up to her 2021 output.<\/p>\n<p>By the time I reached LA, I had fully sunk deep into the labyrinthian world of  Mann\u2019s magnum opus. It\u2019s also \u2014 for better or worse \u2014 a novel about depression and seeing the beauty of the world in short flashes rather than as the status quo. Walking around Silverlake, I found the bright cheery light oppressive rather than hopeful, not unlike Japanese Breakfast\u2019s new song, \u201cWinter in LA.\u201d I tell Zauner it\u2019s my favorite song on her new record.<\/p>\n<p><span><\/span>\u201cI really love that song. Songs that I like are not always popular with other people, so I\u2019m glad you like it,\u201d Zauner says. \u201cIt was the last song I wrote for the album. I was recording the record in LA in December and watching people eat Thanksgiving dinner outside, which was so surreal. I have a really bad relationship with the city. I get severely depressed.\u201d <\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><span class=\"rm-shortcode\" data-rm-shortcode-id=\"d6965f37e627919211d0489695f0f3bf\" style=\"padding-top:56.25%\"><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Japanese Breakfast - Mega Circuit (Official Video)\" width=\"840\" height=\"630\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/BEJ_9veuPXI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>The album process sprawled across 2023, just as <em>Jubilee <\/em>was starting to wind down and right before Zauner ended up going to South Korea to spend a year taking Korean lessons. The Philly-based superstar hates having off-time. \u201cI was reflecting on that song&#8230; I came up with that line:<em> &#8216;<\/em>&#8216;I wish you had a happier woman\/ One that could leave the house,&#8217; because my husband was constantly telling me to take a walk while I was working on the record. I feel this need to suffer in order to feel enjoyment.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Balance isn\u2019t easy for Zauner. After the skyrocketing success of her memoir, she decided she needed to try and figure out how to manage her personal life. Intense stage fright dogged her years touring her 2021 record even while singing boisterous songs about glee and seizing the moment. \u201cI felt bad for my husband because he never gets a happier version of me. I just want to stay at home all the time. I feel bad because all of these artists like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan have all these deeply fruitful years in LA, and it\u2019s really unfair of me to be a miserable poet.\u201d She laughs. Moments like these made her realize she had other things to tend to.<\/p>\n<p>In response to the \u201cbright palette\u201d of <em><em>Jubilee<\/em><\/em>, Zauner skewed towards telling a different story. \u201cI just wanted to do the opposite of that. With <em><em>Jubilee<\/em><\/em> I got to be this high-femme representation of myself and I was longing to dress more androgynously in darker clothing. I wanted to give the new record a darker sonic palette. I really missed playing guitar. I felt quite uncomfortable in that role of constantly being a singer all of a sudden, which was never something I was interested in or really identified as.\u201d <em><em>For Melancholy Brunettes &amp; sad women <\/em><\/em>is a more \u201cinsular and story-based record.\u201d Many of the narrators are men. Zauner sings about mega circuits, ATVs and cars just as much as lost love. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of a celebration of boyhood and wondering what makes this kind of innocent activity turn towards violence.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><img alt=\"\" class=\"rm-shortcode lazyload\" data-rm-shortcode-id=\"0781ab09ac78c8528380422ac48bf0f1\" data-rm-shortcode-name=\"rebelmouse-image\" id=\"aaec4\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" data-src=\"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/img-157.jpg\"><\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Zauner\u2019s seen the speculation that <em>Melancholy Brunettes<\/em> is her incel album based on the single \u201cMega Circuit,\u201d but she points out it\u2019s deeper than that. In many ways, the record\u2019s exploration of boyhood and androgyny is about trying to understand a phenomenon rather than diagnose it. \u201cFrom a young age I\u2019ve always written from the perspective of boys. On <em>Jubilee<\/em> it was quite wholesome, it was a young boy who lives in Kokomo, Indiana saying goodbye to his childhood sweetheart. I wrote \u2018Lindsey\u2019 with Big Little League as a way to understand this possessive man who wants to buy the affection of the woman he\u2019s seeing. I wanted to embody that person to shine a light on that perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In 2023, she started reading the incel canon \u2014 including <em>Infinite Jest<\/em> \u2014 trying to understand the aesthetics of something she felt to be dangerous. \u201cI was thinking a lot about this generation of young men responding to the way the world is changing and this lack of positive representation for masculinity. We\u2019ve clearly politically isolated this group of people who are desiring comfort to be accepted. How do we figure a way out? I mean clearly the votes show there are lots of young men and young men who feel this way and are not talking about it.\u201d How do we not push them away? \u201cThe album\u2019s not a moral tale, but an observation about this type of person \u2014 where those feelings are coming from.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Zauner points out that, even in incel literature, there\u2019s complexity, sharing that both Chuck Palahniuk and Brett Easton Ellis are openly gay men. Of course, their politics are hardly pro-queer liberation. \u201cI love these books and I think this was my way of trying to understand what these groups are connecting to.\u201d Literary references abound across the new record. John Cheever, both Virginia Woolf\u2019s <em>Orlando<\/em> and Sally Potter\u2019s film adaptation, and of course, <em>The Magic Mountain<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s my husband\u2019s favorite book,&#8221; she says. &#8220;I\u2019d been meaning to read it for a long time. We went to Switzerland and I decided to take it up. I loved it so much.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><span class=\"rm-shortcode\" data-rm-shortcode-id=\"98d8d5bf7c3b53ac528037d8017ab934\" style=\"padding-top:56.25%\"><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Japanese Breakfast - Orlando in Love (Official Video)\" width=\"840\" height=\"473\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/i9rcfX_t3nU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>The final song on the new record is a musical adaptation of the door stopper of a book. \u201cHans Castorp is maybe one of my favorite literary characters of all time. He\u2019s very, very impressionable, very foolish, very fanciful. He only smokes Maria Mancini cigars and he takes his breakfast on the balcony with his camel hair blanket. He\u2019s such a fancy little boy. I love him. Thomas Mann writes about him in a tone that\u2019s so cynical and cruel but also loving. I think I wrote my impression of it on the song \u2018Magic Mountain.\u2019 That\u2019s where \u2018Orlando in Love\u2019 was born from too, this character in my mind. Orlando became this avatar on the record of this foolish, whimsical man who lives at sea and answers the siren\u2019s call to be killed.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>This baroque tone carries out in the \u201cOrlando in Love\u201d music video, also heavily inspired by Sally Potter\u2019s take on Woolf\u2019s fanciful novel. Gothic fiction, Greek myth,and epic poems like Orlando Furioso inspired a \u201ccreepier\u201d album, Zauner says. \u201cLeda\u201d is a take on the cruelty of the gods; her Jeff Bridges duet \u201cMen in Bars\u201d tells another tale of fatal love. Gone are the elaborate arrangements of <em><em>Jubilee<\/em><\/em>, replaced by plucked guitars and breathy vocals produced by Blake Mills. (The California-based producer is known for his folksy, jangly work with Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius and Feist.) The stories are front and center, accentuated by minimal strings and percussion. <\/p>\n<p>After recording the album, Zauner moved to South Korea and focused on mastering the language. \u201cIt\u2019s everyone\u2019s fantasy to go back to school, and redo and experiment.\u201d The pressures of touring and making money faded away as she was able to spend time doing just one thing as opposed to having other people\u2019s livelihoods in her hands. She exchanged mix notes over the internet throughout 2024 while exploring Seoul. I ask if she had any favorite food discoveries. \u201cI ate a lot of my favorite things, for some reason, which Korean people probably found weird. It&#8217;s like a rice cake called garaetteok. It&#8217;s like a thick cylinder,\u201d Zauner tells me. \u201cIf you&#8217;ve ever had tteokbokki, it&#8217;s a big fat version of that rice cake. I would just put it in my air fryer and grill it so it would be really crispy and brown on the outside and a really interesting gooey texture on the inside. Then I would dip it into sesame oil and salt, and I ate that probably three times a week. It&#8217;s just a weird texture and really simple. And I ate that for breakfast all the time. I have a very vivid memory of that.\u201d <\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><img alt=\"\" class=\"rm-shortcode lazyload\" data-rm-shortcode-id=\"96e3596fc48dda95fb1bf14fa0797f3a\" data-rm-shortcode-name=\"rebelmouse-image\" id=\"d6c06\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" data-src=\"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/img-158.jpg\"><\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Now that Zauner&#8217;s year away is over, she\u2019s back to touring and playing shows. I ask her what it was like to play on <em>Jimmy Fallon<\/em> again. \u201cIt was really special actually. When we did <em>Fallon <\/em>the first time, it had to be something we recorded ourselves so we didn\u2019t actually get to go into the studio. A lot of the stage fright I had during the <em><em>Jubilee<\/em><\/em> cycle stemmed from playing on television which is so, so scary. I had so much anxiety during that time, I was worried that when I returned to music again that fear would carry with me. It was such a relief to play Fallon again and let that go,\u201d Zauner says. \u201cI had normal nerves but I felt like,<em><em> I\u2019ve done this before<\/em><\/em>. I feel very comfortable this year. We\u2019re not doing that again. We\u2019re not letting our mind self-sabotage. It was really healing to be honest to play Fallon and not have to starve myself for three days because I\u2019m afraid I&#8217;m gonna have a stomach ache or something.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Instead, playing \u201cOrlando in Love\u201d live was like a homecoming. She smiles with her eyes closed in a silky white bonnet as she starts singing the opening lines. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cMaybe that was an ugly way to tell that story,\u201d she jokes. \u201cNo,\u201d I say. \u201cNot at all.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><em>Photography: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/pakbae\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pak Bae<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Michelle Zauner\u2019s advice, I read Thomas Mann\u2019s The Magic Mountain on the six-hour flight from New York to LA. During our Zoom interview, we discussed the book\u2019s cult appeal and why Japanese Breakfast took a hiatus after the massive success of Jubilee and her hit memoir Crying in H Mart. The two projects balanced one another out: a boisterous yellow-tinged album, and a personal tale of food and grief. The singer-songwriter\u2019s third record, For Melancholy Brunettes &amp; sad women, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/20\/japanese-breakfast-climbs-the-magic-mountain\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Japanese Breakfast Climbs the Magic Mountain&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2234,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2232"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2238,"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions\/2238"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.isshicare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}