Japanese Breakfast’s sad songs say so much
When Michelle Zauner was in Little Big League, she concentrated on writing songs for the band’s albums. But it would sometimes take a year before they could tour, so she decided she didn’t want to wait anymore.
“When we went on hiatus, I wanted to share what I was writing with more immediacy,” says Zauner. “I decided to stop waiting for inspiration to strike and just go for it. In June of 2013, I told myself I’d record 30 tracks in 30 days and, at the end of the month, put out the result on cassette. Some days, I had 10 minutes to write. Some days, I had more time. I forced myself to maximize my creativity.”
The result was June, her first effort as Japanese Breakfast, a collection that took Zauner’s music in a more contemplative direction. She followed it up with two more cassette-only releases, Where Is My Great Big Feeling? and American Sound. “I like the raw, instinctual sounds you get on cassettes,” says Zauner. “To listen to them, you have to turn them over manually. It forces you to listen to the album as a whole piece of music.”
After making three cassettes, Zauner had almost 50 songs in her catalogue. “When I started Japanese Breakfast, it was still a rock band, but when I recorded the songs, they turned into something else,” she says. “With my co-producer, Ned Eisenberg, I incorporated sampled sounds and electronic elements.”
The end product is Psychopomp, a dark, intimate record that complements Zauner’s understated vocals with washes of ambient sound and waves of drowsy processed guitar. “In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is the mediator between the conscious and subconscious mind,” says Zauner. “To some people, it suggests psychotic pop, which is what it sounds like on the surface, but if you look deeper, the music is really sad.”
—j. poet
