MUSIC
HERE COME THE WARM TONES
Japanese Breakfast heads in a more spirited musical direction on new album By Jeff Niesel
Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner. Photo by Peter Ash Lee
JAPANESE BREAKFAST’S Michelle Zauner says she originally wanted to become a journalist. “I was always interested in writing since middle school,” the singersongwriter says via Zoom from her Brooklyn, NY home. Japanese Breakfast performs at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 5, at the Agora. “I thought that in order to be a writer, I had to be a journalist. I was interested in journalism in middle school and high school.” Though she wanted to form a band rather than attend college, Zauner did go to college and studied creative writing. She refers to the experience as “life changing.” “I learned so much about how to read and write,” she says. “Neither one of my parents went to college, and they weren’t particularly avid readers. I was exposed to a lot of I had never been exposed to before and that really resonated with me in a way that older texts from my high school curriculum didn’t. Those texts don’t hit you as hard. I liked reading Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, but there’s something that hits you differently if you read Philip Roth or Tobias Wolff or more modern, contemporary writers. It draws you in in a different way and was really enchanting for me. I only got my undergrad. It was a real compromise for me to go to college, but my parents left me alone once I was there, so I could just do what interested me the most.” Zauner played in a number of bands in college and would eventually form the indie rock act Japanese Breakfast in 2013. The band blossomed, catching Zauner by surprise. “In 2016, I released my debut album on this small label called Yellow K,” she says. “I told [the label] I didn’t want to tour, and it was a waste of money for them to invest in press, and I’m glad they didn’t listen to me.
July 28-August 10, 2021 | clevescene.com |
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