Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast names the best song she’s ever written
Michelle Zauner is best known as the frontwoman of the indie-pop band Japanese Breakfast. Zauner started the band as a side project when she was playing in Little Big League and set about writing the songs that would become the Japanese Breakfast debut album Psychopomp in 2014.
Later that year, she returned to her hometown of Eugene, Oregon, to take care of her sick mother. During that time, she began writing songs to deal with the stress and grief when her mother died. Psychopomp was released to critical acclaim and commercial success and set Zauner up for a career in the music industry.
Since then, Zauner has released two more albums under the Japanese Breakfast name, Soft Sounds from Another Planet in 2017 and Jubilee in 2021. However, before Jubilee’s release, Zauner worked on a soundtrack for the video game Sable, also released by the Japanese Breakfast name.
Game developer Daniel Fineberg had contacted Zauner to write the soundtrack as he knew she loved video games, even though she had no prior experience writing soundtracks. However, he felt that using someone without any experience would lead to an interesting and unconventional sound. He was right; Sable’s soundtrack is absolutely stunning.
During an interview with Slate, Zauner noted that she learned a few new things from working on Sable. “The first one is, I don’t typically write really ambient sprawling instrumental loops. A lot of these had to be these perfect loops, and that was a little bit of a struggle for me, especially as someone who’s really rooted in pop writing, because you’re constantly chasing earworms and trying to get a hook in within the first 15 seconds.”
She added: “The other thing was writing lyrics was very different, because so much of my music and Japanese Breakfast is very, very personal and rooted in these hyperspecific details. So I had to be very impressionistic with the lyrics and focus on these broader universal themes that could be interpreted in many different ways.”
The game’s main theme is ‘Glider’, which is one of the songs on the soundtrack that Zauner provided vocals. However, ‘Glider’ was not the only track on which she was able to perform vocals. She noted: “The main menu has vocals and lyrics, and then there is an ending theme called ‘Better the Mask’.”
‘Better the Mask’ is a song from the Japanese Breakfast catalogue that is close to Zauner’s heart. “That is honestly, I think, my favourite song I’ve ever written as an artist,” she said. “And I hope that song gets as much affection as ‘Glider’ has because I’m really, really proud of that song.”
