Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner on Exploring Joy Through Her New Album 'Jubilee'

For the indie pop singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, who goes by the stage moniker of Japanese Breakfast, the last several years had seen her processing the 2014 death of her Korean mother Chongmi from cancer at the age of 56—a tragic loss that informed Japanese Breakfast's first two critically acclaimed albums Psychopomp and Soft Sounds From Another Planet. But for her third record Jubilee, which came out Friday, strikes a more optimistic tone and signals that she is ready to move forward. The new album's arrival comes as Zauner's recently published memoir Crying in H Mart—a meditation about her mother and their shared love for Korean food—has generated universal attention and praise.

"After writing this very dark, intense book," Zauner tells Newsweek, "I really wanted some lightness. I just placed a lot of importance on artists who have long discographies, and what a third album means. For me, it was a record that should be just so full of confidence. I wanted it to just be a really bombastic, big confident record. Early on, I loved the title 'jubilee,' and so I wanted to write a record that felt like it belonged on an album called Jubilee.

Like its predecessor Soft Sounds From Another Planet, Jubilee marks a further progression in Zauner's music, as it verges between electronic textured uptempo tracks ("Savage Good Boy," "In Hell," "Slide Tackle") and meditative, reflective atmospheric numbers ("Sit," "Tactics"). "This album is about joy," she says, "but it's also about pure feeling. I think that because Soft Sounds is this record about disassociation and preserving your mental health by not being all the way there, I felt very ready to embrace purely, unadulterated feeling."

She attributes the new album's bright sonic diversity and ambitious-sounding arrangements (including strings and horns) to her co-producer/multi-instrumentalist Craig Hendrix. "He has such a kind of classical background," she says. "We've been working together for a long time, and he's really encouraged me to step up and work harder as a composer, arranger and producer. The two of us wrote all of the string arrangements and horn arrangements together. It felt like an album that had to be the biggest thing that we've ever made, so we wanted to go full force with huge arrangements and really flex our capabilities."

The first indication of Jubilee's upbeat and upfront sound is the danceable first single "Be Sweet," which Zauner co-wrote with Wild Nothing's Jack Tatum. That song was originally intended to be recorded for another artist until Zauner herself decided to take a stab at it. "As we wrote it, I was like: 'Oh, I actually really like this, and I think I want to keep it.' And so Jack was enthusiastic about it, and then we got together again in 2019 to polish it up. Then Craig also jumped on the track and helped me arrange the harmonies. It just became the beast that it was over time."

Another recent single off of Jubilee is the romantic and dreamy electronica-laced "Posing in Bondage," a song that Zauner describes as a little complicated. For me, it feels like the lengths that we go to please other people and the frustrations of being ignored. Bondage is all about this sort of tension, and I feel like the sonic quality of that song is just so full of tension and so yearning. It's kind of about the beauty of monogamy and the importance of monogamy in my life, but also knowing that monogamy is never this pure perfect thing. We all have yearnings for other people, but I think love is learning to cope with those and understand that they're natural and not to feel shame about it necessarily--to know that your love and your devotion to someone is about resisting those."

In a similar musical tone is the lovely "Kokomo, IN," which sounds reminiscent of a romantic French ballad. It tells the story of a young man saying goodbye to his girlfriend who is embarking on the next phase of her life. "That song feels really cinematic to me," she says. "One of my favorite lines that I've written for that song is 'Show off to the world, the parts I felt so hard for.' In some ways, you're so heartbroken because you don't get to be with that person. But in another sense, you know that they're incredible because you fell in love with what's so incredible about them."

Jubilee ends on a high note of majestic proportions with "Posing for Cars," which, at over six minutes, is the longest song on the record. It begins slowly before morphing into this powerful rock song highlighted by an epic guitar solo that serves as a coda.

"I think I have a very natural inclination to end the album [with] an acoustic somber ballad—my last two records also ended in that way," says Zauner. "I wrote it about two people who love each other in very different ways. I love people very intensely and I can be very moody (laughs). My husband is very stoic and patient, and loves more gradually. I loved him immediately and right away it was forever. I wrote about the different ways that you can love each other, and we love each other in such different ways. But they're both very pure and true.

"The last line of the record," she continues, "is "A single slow desire fermenting," which I love. The second to last chapter of [Crying in H Mart] is all about fermentation and comparing memory to fermentation—your memory and your love of someone taking on a new life as if it was from fermenting. The song kind of reminded me of this Wilco song, "At Least That's What You Said," which also starts as this quiet meditation, and this long guitar solo takes over it to say what's left unsaid. So I wanted to write a guitar solo that kind of said the rest."

Today Zauner has achieved mainstream success through her music, which has been discussed in major media outlets, along with headlining shows and appearances at major festivals (She recently guested on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon performing "Be Sweet'' and "Jimmy Fallon Big!"). Her path to a music career developed during her teenage years when was inspired by Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, who, like Zauner, is half Korean and half white herself. But Zauner's desire to become a musician was initially met with resistance by her mother; as she detailed in Crying in H Mart, her mother once told her to give up that pursuing music resulting in an argument between the two.

"In retrospect," I wonder if I had a mother that was so open to me being a musician or an artist, [whether] I would have been so drawn to it, or if I would have worked as hard as I did," Zauner says today. "[Music] was a huge part of my life. I had so much creativity burning in me to express that I couldn't just set it down. It was such a major point of contention in our relationship. I think at the end of the book, and my life in general, is such a serendipitous thing that my mother never got to see me become successful on my own terms as an artist.

"As I got older, she did kind of relent. One of the most special moments of the book is when my mother said, 'I've never met someone like you.' That was such a huge turning point in our relationship. That was her way of saying, 'Okay, I get it now. I get that you love this and it's not going away, and I'm sorry that I was maybe not supportive.' It was her job to protect me—not only financially preparing me for the struggle of what it entailed, but also mentally the amount of rejection and failure that you have to endure as an artist when it doesn't work out for you. I think she was just so worried about my mental health, too, that she really felt like it was her role to try to ground me into something more realistic."

With her new album and book now out in the world, along with an impending summer tour, Zauner acknowledges a sense of personal closure following her mother's passing and expressing her grief through music and words. "I think there is certainly going to be grief that lives with me forever. But I do feel like I've honored my mother in some way. Now that I have said all that I needed to say about that, I do feel like I'm able to explore other parts of my life and the world. The new album is about joy and I was really excited to write about something new, because I've been living and writing about this grief for over five years, and it's time to write about other things."