After four years of almost constant movement, 2020 was the year that Michelle Zauner finally had to sit still. For the past half-decade, she had been a one-woman whirlwind of activity, releasing two highly acclaimed albums as Japanese Breakfast, the second one arriving before she was even done touring for the first one. For much of the band’s history, Zauner served not only as its lead singer and songwriter but also as its manager, tour organizer, and merch person, while somehow also finding time to direct its videos. In simpler times, 2020 would have lined up as the year that Japanese Breakfast released its third full-length release, continued to increase its font size on the bills of bigger and bigger festivals, inspired a handful of think-pieces on the increasing visibility of Korean-American artists, and made stops at All Songs Considered and on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Instead, aside from recording a collaborative EP over email exchanges under the BUMPER moniker with Crying’s Ryan Galloway, she sat at home in her Brooklyn apartment and waited.
For Zauner, even a period of relative inactivity included doing the last edits on her debut novel, Crying in H Mart; writing and recording two hours of soundtrack music for indie video game Sable; and having extra time to obsess over the finishing touches for Jubilee, her highly eclectic, strikingly singular third Japanese Breakfast album. Never before had she created so much new material and had so little certainty about when it would actually be delivered to her audience. When describing the imposed hiatus to Under the Radar in July of 2020, she didn’t mince words. Watching the gears of the music industry grind to a halt was akin to “grieving a loved one that’s in a coma.” Anyone who is familiar with Zauner’s backstory knows that such a reference wasn’t simply a pointed metaphor by a frustrated artist. The last time she was forced to sit still was while she watched her mother die.
The six months Zauner spent caring for her mother, Chongmi, following her terminal cancer diagnosis in 2014, have loomed large over her creative work ever since. There she is, reaching out from the cover of 2016’s Psychopomp, young and vibrant in better times. That’s her voice saying “gwenchanta”— “it’s okay” in Korean—on the album’s title track, taken from a recording of her consoling her daughter on the day she learned of her diagnosis. The songs on Japanese Breakfast’s second album, 2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet, continued the exploration of sorrow and loss through a series of songs that posed existential questions and clawed toward an uneasy transcendence. Now, with a novel that tells the story of her mother’s illness in unflinching detail and an album that was designed to explore the pursuit of joy, 2021 is poised to be the year Zauner moves out of the shadow of grief.
“I honestly haven’t thought about it much until this year, when I reflected back on how charmed the last four years were for me and this band,” Zauner says on a gray November afternoon. Still months before she’ll announce the release of her next album, she is careful not to say anything that will preemptively kick off the next press cycle. “Because I was so horse-with-blinders, like, ‘I need to work. I need to work. I need to work. I need to make something incredible. I need to make the best video. I need to play all of the shows. I need to do all of the interviews.’ I enjoyed it, I think, but I didn’t revel in how charmed things were for me. I was just so scared of losing it that I couldn’t go, ‘Whoa, this is working.’”
It must have seemed a cruel plot twist that just as everything in her career was working, the rest of the world shut down. Though has been finished for some time—a lyric sheet from her label lists the original release date as October 23, 2020—Zauner says she just couldn’t bear to release the album and then wait a year to tour it. She had zero interest in promoting it by reducing its expansive, multilayered arrangements to solo acoustic livestream performances. It’s celebratory
