Japanese Breakfast

Japanese Breakfast singer/ songwriter Michelle Zauner has much to celebrate. Recently topping the New York Times Best Seller list with her memoir Crying in H Mart, completing her third Japanese Breakfast album, Jubilee, and the soundtrack to the open world exploration video game, Sable, all three projects showcase her rapidly ascending talent.

While Zauner’s lyrical observations defined the pain and suffering of losing her mother to cancer in 2014, her reputation for writing devastatingly catchy songs blotted with thorny narratives has grown from album to album. With Zauner focused on stretching her songwriting capabilities to the max, Jubilee details her fight for contentment and continued studio evolution.

Why did the word Jubilee come to mind as a title for the album?

“For a long time I’ve wanted to move away from themes of grief and loss. I felt that Psychopomp was my grief album but I didn’t think that I was ready to move on with Soft Sounds from Another Planet and had to write an entire book about that experience in order to really feel like I’d closed the chapter. With Jubilee I had a natural interest to write about something on the opposite end of human experience – a real celebration of release and joy, which is in some ways an unexpected theme for the indie rock genre in general.”

Would you say that, lyrically, you’re projecting more on this record?

“My records in general are more of a mixed bag than people allow them there’s a song called that’s about falling in love with a robot – that’s pretty fictional, and there’s a song on called that’s about slot machines and sex workers. One thing that I really love about making records is that you can flow through fiction and non-fiction but, ultimately, everything’s a commentary on real life in some way. Even a song about falling in love with a robot is really about the different ways that people connect to one another.”