“Be Sweet” by Japanese Breakfast, Thursday, June 20, 2024

Michelle Chongmi Zauner was busy in 2021 promoting her band Japanese Breakfast’s third album, Jubilee, and her memoir Crying in H Mart, a heartbreaking work chronicling the illness and death of her mother. The book is far more than a music memoir--readers need not be familiar with Zauner’s band to appreciate the writing or the story--the singer does talk about her musical background and how she happened upon a music career after her mother’s death when she had mostly given up on the prospect of being known for her music. Before Zauner formed Japanese Breakfast, she had been the lead singer of the Emo rock band Little Big League. The band formed in 2011, recorded two studio albums, and dissolved in 2014 following Michelle’s mother’s cancer diagnosis as Zauner left the band’s home base of Philadelphia to be with her family in Eugene, Oregon.

PACIFY HER RAGE. Japanese Breakfast was Michelle Zauner’s side project that she started in 2013 when still in Little Big League. She says that she chose the name because she wanted to make Americans wonder what Japanese people eat for breakfast. In her 2021 memoir, Zauner talks about the tastes she had growing up as the child of two foodies. Crying in H Mart was released at a time when Korean food had started to become popular outside of Asia as the popularity of K-pop and Korean dramas entered Western pop culture. Zauner describes the delectable, though often unfamiliar, tastes she experienced especially from her mother’s Korean--not Japanese--heritage. After her mother died in October 2014, Michelle took a job in advertising in New York. She found the corporate world unfulfilling and continued to write music as a hobby under her Japanese Breakfast side project. The songs she wrote helped her remember her mother and reconnect with her past and her heritage. In 2016, Zauner released Psychopomp, a collection of songs about her mother and the country she had fallen in love with. After being rejected by several other labels, the album was released on a small indie label, Yellow K. On the And the Writer Is… Podcast, Michelle talked about the small label and a publicist who believed in the album, which ultimately led to the album being released on a bigger label later in 2016 and a breakout national tour with Mitski which helped Japanese Breakfast become a full-time project.

TELL THE MEN I’M COMING. The two Michelle Zauner projects from 2021 feel quite different in tone. The memoir is similar in tone to Psychopomp, but on Japanese Breakfast’s third album, Jubilee, Zauner writes fictional tales like on the songs “Kokomo, IN” and “Savage Good Boy.” She writes bright songs like the opener “Paprika.” But the album’s clearest shot at a radio single, “Be Sweet,” is a funky disco-infused confectionary. Zauner co-wrote the song with Jack Tatum of the band Wild Nothing. Zauner typically writes lyrics alone. The song could be interpreted as fiction, though Michelle is married to bandmate Peter Bradley who plays bass on the band’s recordings and tours with his wife. Bradley had been in a Little Big League with Zauner and married Michelle just before her mother died in 2014. Zauner wrote of Peter that he “was the first person [she] ever dated that [her] mother liked.” As a character in Zauner’s memoir, he plays the role of a supportive partner during a time that no couple ever wants to experience--the death of a parent. Peter often fades into the background until she brings him back out again. She proposed to him as she wanted her mother to be a part of the wedding. Michelle is a charismatic personality who knows her worth and demands it from a partner, both in the memoir and in “Be Sweet.” The music video for the song is pure fun: a stylized X-Files knock-off, star Zauner and the lead singer to a band Little Big League toured with, Mannequin Pussy. Michelle and Marisa “Missy” Dabice look amazing in ‘80s hair and shoulder-padded suits.