NEW YORK, NY — On the first of four nights at Brooklyn Paramount, the energy was nothing short of ebullient. “Love your shoes, Michelle!” someone shouted out early in the set.
“I love all the crowns!” Zauner replied with a sweet, slightly bashful smile.
Michelle Zauner was referring to the paper crowns that fans have been wearing in homage to the one that Peter Bradley—guitarist in Japanese Breakfast (and Zauner’s husband)—donned in March for the album release show at El Museo del Barrio. For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) had just dropped, and Zauner and bandmates (Bradley, Craig Hendrix (piano), Lauren Baba, Isabel Hagen, Caitlin Sullivan (strings)) put on a pared-down show that was endearing in its grade-school recital aesthetic. At the door, monastic robe-clad friends handed out DIY “Playbills.” The stage was framed by cardboard cut-outs in the shape of ocean waves, and Bradley’s paper crown evoked, perhaps, a seafaring prince as counterpart to the siren from the lead single, “Orlando in Love” (singing his name with all the sweetness of a mother/leaving him breathless and then drowned).
Between Acts I and II at El Museo del Barrio, two tiger puppets mimed a call between Zauner and her father—the first after much time and distance and hurt. (Those who have read Zauner’s memoir, Crying in H Mart, or her piece in Harper’s Bazaar will have a sense of the roots and tendrils of the estrangement.) “Tell me everything”—it was how Zauner’s dad answered the phone, and the first line of “Leda.” The song refers to the Greek myth in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to seduce a Spartan queen. (Toxic masculinity is an evergreen theme, it seems.)
These classic mythologies serve as avatars for the very modern anxieties and foibles the album explores—we seek connection and inevitably often see it go awry.
The visuals around the album are sumptuously conceived. The video for “Orlando in Love” draws from German Romanticism (Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” was on the visual moodboard) and adds a dose of playful self-irony—a monk wakes from a wine-dazed dream, a swashbuckling explorer is lured to a watery grave.
In “Picture Window,” the camera tracks inexorably left to right, following a couple, hands clasped, as they run through an ever-shifting cityscape. One of the pair is exuberant, the other, increasingly apprehensive. The video, filmed in Seoul, reminds me of a Wong Kar Wai film, with neon lights on humid nights, solitude in a dense crowd, and a sense of foreboding as time constricts and the city closes in.
The bedevilment that is linear time is a throughline in Zauner’s interviews about the new album—specifically, our inability to outwit or outrun time, and the attendant sense of loss. I find this deeply resonant.
I picked up Crying in H Mart a few years ago, hoping to inoculate myself against a savage grief that crouches in wait ahead. In the memoir, Zauner navigates the loss of her mother and the meanings of her biracial identity, in part by learning to make the food she associates with the Korean side of her family. (For the uninitiated, H Mart is an American chain specializing in Asian groceries.) The opening line alone wrecks me—“Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.”
Food and memory are tightly bound together. For first- and second-generation immigrant kids, there’s an extra layer of complication when, for instance, you can’t recall the right brand of shaoxing cooking wine to buy, in part because you can’t read the label. It’s not about the food item itself—the meal isn’t ruined if I get the wrong variety of Kokuho Rose rice. It’s what the food stands for, and the future absence to which it gestures. In this globalized economy, I can buy a replacement Tatung-brand rice cooker when mine breaks. But it won’t be the Tatung rice cooker my parents brought from Taipei to LA to Dallas, and then to New York, when I started college. (Tatung rice cookers appear in Hua Hsu’s Stay True. When I met the author and New Yorker music writer last year, I told him that the passing reference to a quintessentially Taiwanese thing really hit different. He got it, of course, and referred me to an Instagram account that documents the humble appliance’s cameos on TV and in films.) Trivial details, like the right firmness of tofu to add to the egg-tomato stir fry, take on outsize importance when they’re the Hansel-and-Gretel breadcrumbs by which we hope to make our way home. As Zauner puts it: “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?”
Crying in H Mart and the latest Japanese Breakfast album populate, for me, a landscape of anticipatory grief that’s both personal and diffuse. In the wake of her mother’s death, Zauner writes: “I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.” When your parents leave everything and everyone they know behind to make a future for you, their child, the weight of that inheritance can feel crushing. Zauner mourns the difficulty of decoding what’s been passed along to her. I sometimes fear it’s a bequest that’s untranslatable. I can look (and look back) all I want, but time forces me to move forward. The body is a blade that moves while your brain is writhing.
In a recent interview with W Magazine, Zauner shared that 20201’s Grammy-nominated Jubilee “was a permission to feel joy after many years of grieving. But Melancholy is about giving yourself permission to feel sad about things that aren’t just your grief.”
Joy and sadness may seem like opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, but if you’re expecting whiplash from one album to the next, that’s not the case. Zauner explores the human condition with a deftness that drew me to her prose in Crying in H Mart and keeps me returning to Japanese Breakfast’s songs. Hers is not violent sadness or naïve happiness, but an accounting of all that accompanies our reckoning with unlived storylines. At each fork in the road, we can choose only one path—to leave or stay with the untrue lover (think “Honey Water” or “Road Head”), to keep the corporate gig or go all-in on the band, to forge ahead or reach back across the chasm of two worlds, two generations, too many sets of expectations (my take on “Diving Woman”). Maybe it’s not about right or wrong choices, but about the accumulation of gentle joys and complex longings on which we build our singular lives. Compare, for example, the lines from the opening track of Melancholy—Life is sad, but here is someone—with the Gordius-meets-Godot vibe of “Leda”—trying to cut the Gordian-like knot of family history, You wait, you wait, you wait.
The arrangements in and production of Melancholy (with Blake Mills at the helm) are pretty, and I don’t think that’s a reductive descriptor. It’s pretty in the way sunrise was pretty when viewed from a hospital room window, the city revealed in a rosy glow as a loved one fought to not fade away. Zauner’s voice is delicate, the strings are romantic, the pedal steel and synths gleam and shimmer, but the underlying truths are hard.
The juxtaposition of cutting lyrics (in particular, “Mega Circuit”) with dreamy stage design and lighting is an effective one. Night one (of four) at Brooklyn Paramount started with the band bathed in dense golden fog, Zauner perched on a giant seashell (like Venus/from a shell), an old-fashioned lantern at her feet. Later in the set, the (LED) neon sign “Melancholy Inn” lit up for the song “Men in Bars.” On the album, Jeff Bridges joins the duet. At the show, Zauner sings next to Craig Hendrix at the piano. It’s a sweet ballad with quietly devastating observations about quotidian failings and compromises—even when it breaks apart, it’s ours. I could imagine a flickering sign underneath “Melancholy Inn,” the “No” in “No Vacancy” blinking in and out.
Ahead of the album release, Zauner sat down for an interview at National Sawdust with Arooj Aftab. Something Zauner said that night has lingered with me: The songs on Melancholy are not about love per se, but about the “bunglement” of time. The older we get, the more we’re aware of unlived storylines and closed doors.
This idea adds context to the refrain from “Picture Window,” All of my ghosts are real/All of my ghosts are my home. Melancholy Inn is haunted, perhaps, but the ghosts are familiar. And for now, there’s another sunrise to see out the window.
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