Foto-© Pak Bae

Im bisherigen musikalischen Wirken von Japanese Breakfast war die Band Improvisation gewohnt: nach einem Jahrzehnt, in dem die Band das Beste aus improvisierten Aufnahmeräumen in Lagerhäusern, Wohnwagen und Lofts gemacht hat, ist For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), das am 21. März via Dead Oceans erschienen ist, in dieser Hinsicht eine Premiere – nämlich das erste richtige Studioalbum der Band! Produziert von GRAMMY-Preisträger Blake Mills (Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple), zieht sich Frontfrau und Songschreiberin Michelle Zauner von der hellen Extrovertiertheit des Vorgängers Jubilee zurück, um die dunkleren Wogen zu erforschen, die in ihrem Inneren brodeln – das launische, fruchtbare Feld der Melancholie, das seit langem als der psychische Zustand von Dichtern am Rande der Inspiration gilt. Das Ergebnis ist eine künstlerische Absichtserklärung: ein reifes, komplexes, nachdenkliches Werk, das den romantischen Nervenkitzel einer Gothic Novel heraufbeschwört.

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) folgt einer transformativen Periode in Zauners Leben, in der ihr zweifach GRAMMY-nominiertes Durchbruchsalbum Jubilee und ihre Bestseller-Memoiren Crying In H Mart – die als Tränen im Asia-Markt auch hierzulande erschienen sind – sie in den kulturellen Mainstream katapultierten und ihre tiefsten künstlerischen Ambitionen erfüllten. Als sie über diesen Erfolg nachdachte, wurde Zauner die Ironie des Verlangens bewusst, die so oft Glückseligkeit und Verderben miteinander verbindet. “Ich fühlte mich verführt, indem ich bekam, was ich immer wollte“, sagt sie. “Ich flog zu nah an die Sonne heran, und mir wurde klar, dass ich sterben würde, wenn ich weiterflöge“. Das Schicksal von Ikarus und anderen Verdammten verleiht For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) sein beständigstes Thema: die Gefahren des Begehrens. Wie zerstreutes Licht führen seine spektralen Teile die Charaktere des Albums durch Zyklen von Versuchung, Übertretung und Vergeltung.

Obwohl Zauner auf Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017) mit Science-Fiction und auf Jubilee mit heiterem Surrealismus experimentiert hat, ist die Landschaft der europäischen Romantik, die For Melancholy Brunettes zugrunde liegt, und das dichte Gewebe klassischer Anspielungen, das damit einhergeht, Neuland für eine Songwriterin, die ihre künstlerische Reife erreicht. Sie führt ihre Inspiration auf eine Reihe von Vorgängern zurück. Das verlassene Cafémädchen in Degas‘ L’absinthe. Die Seelandschaften von Caspar David Friedrich. Die leidenschaftliche Sehnsucht und die wilden, wogenden Moore in Wuthering Heights. Hans Castorp, eingehüllt in seine Kamelhaardecke, träumend auf dem Balkon des Berghofs. Es ist eine Atmosphäre, die durch die komplizierten, ineinandergreifenden Gitarrenarrangements spürbar wird, die einen Großteil der Platte begleiten und wie Wellen über den Takt plätschern, oft so schräg in ihrem Ausdruck des Akkords, wie Zauner in ihrer Polyvalenz von Gefühl und Einsicht sein kann.

Traurigkeit ist der dominierende emotionale Ton dieser Platte, aber es ist Traurigkeit in einer verfeinerten Form: die nachdenkliche, vorausschauende Traurigkeit der Melancholie, in der die Erkenntnis des im Wesentlichen tragischen Charakters des Lebens mit Sensibilität für seine flüchtige Schönheit einhergeht. Zauner findet darin genügend Platz für Hoffnungsschimmer. Sie sind der Trost der Sterblichen, den Dichter vor ihr angerufen haben und den Dichter nach ihr immer wieder neu entdecken werden: Liebe und Arbeit, und wie sie sich wie stärkende Vorsätze durch die vielen Episoden der Platte ziehen.

Für uns hat Zauner ein Track by Track mit allem Wissenswerten zu den Songs geschrieben!

1. Here is Someone

Yeah, here is someone felt like a really good song to start the record with because it’s sort of in conversation with Magic Mountain, the last song, and it felt like it bookended the record really well. I mean, here is someone is about the trepidation I felt about leaving for a year in 2024 to go to Korea and letting down, you know, bandmates and crew that weren’t going to have work for a year and sort of trying to ask permission to take some time away and imagining a life where things are a little less pressured.

2. Orlando in Love

Orlando in love comes from a from a epic poem called Orlando Innamorato by Boiardo. And I just imagined this character who’s kind of this whimsical, foolish protagonist that falls in love with a siren and is seduced to his watery grave.

3. Honey Water

Honey Water is about a married man that is sort of insatiable in his desire and steps out of the marriage. And it’s from the perspective of a woman that knows full well that that’s happening and has this kind of quiet rebellion of emotionally removing herself from that relationship as a kind of punishment. Yeah, it’s about male desire and the consequences of what that does to a marriage or just infidelity in general and what that can do to a marriage. It’s not a song about my marriage, but it’s a song about a marriage.

4. Mega Circuit

Mega Circuit is about… I think it was on tour, I saw a sign for a Megacircuit like ATV track, just like a dirt track where ATVs roll around. And it’s kind of about like incel men and the women that want to save them and the scary quality of that reality.

5. Little Girl

Little Girl is about a father who is in a hotel room, maybe regretting some of the decisions that he’s made that led to his relationship, how his relationship has changed with his daughter. Honestly, it’s a very personal song, but it’s also a fictional take on imagining the father’s perspective in the situation.

6. Leda

It’s a song about a conversation I had with my father while he was in Crete and our complicated relationship, parts of it that are really beautiful and parts of it that are really sad. And I think I was I was thinking about Greek mythology because, you know, of where he was and the ways that people with power, even the gods that are supposed to be good. I think Greek mythology is so interesting because there are these gods that are so powerful, but they’re so corrupt and they’re not good role models. And when you think of a god, you think of someone that is like so holy and the epitome of good and something to aspire to. And yet in mythology, it’s so fascinating because these are horrible people that abuse their power in such like extraordinary ways to just play with people. I think I was ruminating on that. Not that my father is that awful, but I think I was just thinking of the ways that people can be bad, because the ways that people can misbehave and take advantage of the power they have over one another and just the push and pull of of complicated relationships. There’s a reference to a Gordian knot, which is another mythological story about a knot that’s just so tangled that all of these people go up to try to untie it. And eventually the solution is just to cut it in half. I was thinking a lot about my relationship with my father, obviously, and how to how to how to try to find a solution there.

7. Picture Window

Picture Window is about being so obsessed with and tortured by intrusive thoughts of my husband dying, basically. If my husband is gone for like an extra 20 minutes to, you know, park the car or run an errand, I immediately assume that he’s gotten into some kind of terrible car accident or sometimes I just watch him smoking on the balcony and imagine him falling off. And I think that, I don’t know, I’m just riddled by anxiety and it’s kind of funny because my husband is the exact opposite of that. He doesn’t have any anxiety and he doesn’t think about my death at all. And that can be really frustrating to try to relay why I feel this way. And the chorus is, „But all of my ghosts are real.“ And I think it’s my way of explaining that I think a lot of that anxiety just comes from my brain chemistry, but I think a lot of it also is rooted in watching people very close to me pass away. And I was interested in the fact that when you love someone a lot, it’s a really happy thing, but it’s also can be torturous in this way where I’m just so afraid of losing. I don’t even know what I would do with myself if I lost that last person in my life. But it’s an interesting paradox to be fixated on being so in love and then also being so afraid of losing that person. So yeah, that’s what that song is about.

8. Men in Bars

Yeah, Men in Bars is a murder ballad about a woman and a man who are kind of recalling the beginnings of their courtship and what sort of brought them to this moment where this woman has stepped out on him and gone flirting with men in bars and ultimately leads the man to bring a gun to the bar. I missed a man and a woman singing to each other in a duet and I love the idea of that kind of story.

9. Winter in LA

Winter in LA I wrote while I was recording the album in LA in December. It was winter and LA is this place that I find myself every time I spend a long period of time there, I get so depressed and I think it’s because I have this natural gloomy disposition that when I’m in a sunny place where everyone seems so easygoing and happy I get even more depressed and originally it started as of a song about hating LA and then it kind of developed into something a bit better I think. I was thinking about Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and all these people who have had like really fruitful careers and years in LA and are not stupid people, they’re people with great depth and complexity and brilliant artists and they were able to find great meaning and inspiration in this place. I think I was kind of chastising myself for not being able to relax. Because music, when it’s done really well, should feel effortless and yet it feels so hard won for me every time and I really wanted to find what that was for myself and so that song is sort of chastising myself for not being a little bit more easygoing. When we were living there for a month, my husband was like let’s go out let’s see a movie, let’s like go get dinner, and I felt so tortured by not being a better musician or being a better songwriter and felt like I had to not leave the house. I feel like I have to torture myself or punish myself sometimes for not being better by just never leaving the house and so I said to him something like I wish you had a happier woman, someone who’d leave the house. And I thought, well, that’s very me – and I spun it into a song.

10. Magic Mountain

In 2023 when we toured in Switzerland I read Magic Mountain for the first time and I was so taken by it. I thought at first like Kate Bush I was going to write just a synopsis of the book and then when I went to record it, our engineer Joseph Lord said “you know Blonde Redhead has a song that’s very similar to this” because it’s just a synopsis of the book and it was so weird because I love Blonde Redhead. I’ve definitely listened to that record – but it was before I read the book and I didn’t realize that I was doing the same thing which is so funny. So I thought about how to change it and make it a more personal song largely about finding balance in life between being an artist a working artist and being a good human being and imagining a future, largely imagining having a child someday and what that might how that might impact my life as a working artist.