‘Kokomo, IN’: how Japanese Breakfast beautifully explored teenage love
After a four-year absence from the studio, Japanese Breakfast are finally returning with a new album this year, For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women). The lead single, ‘Orlando in Love’, is a string-led literary ballad that recalls one of the best songs from their last release, 2021’s Jubilee.
Where ‘Orlando in Love’ is inspired by the epic Italian 15th-century poem ‘Orlando Innamorato’ by Renaissance writer Matteo Maria Boiardo, ‘Kokomo, IN’ has its roots in a more contemporary—if imaginary—love story.
“It’s so exhausting to feel that much when you’re a teenager”, Michelle Zauner said in a conversation about the song, “but now that I’m in my 30s, I miss feeling that way sometimes. I’m glad that I don’t feel so much heartbreak and so in love all the fucking time, but there is something so sweet about the pure emotion you have when you’re a teenager.”
Adding, “I guess I was just imagining how I felt at that time and applying this sort of mature lens to it. I loved the idea of being 18 years old and loving someone so much, but realising that they have so much more to give to the world. One of the lines I really love on that song is ‘show off to the world the parts I fell so hard for’. Wouldn’t it be so nice when you were a teenager if someone said that to you?”
When you’re younger, you have more freedom to feel the extremities and the outer limits of your feelings; you have the untamed and untrammelled recklessness of youth and the energy and space in your life to be carried away on a tide of your emotions. When your obligations of work, bills, food, and shopping start to pile up and creep in over time, they can get in the way. You can lose yourself in the rubble of the real world and have less time to naturally feel the purity of your emotions.
Zauner, the heart and the brains behind Japanese Breakfast, knows the harsh realities of the real world better than anyone—as evidenced by the heartbreak and pain she opened up about in her excellent and must-read book Crying in H Mart—but, as she shows in songs like ‘Everybody Wants to Love You’, ‘Be Sweet’ and ‘Paprika’, she knows how to tap into the youthful and child-like feelings of joy, energy and excitement, too.
There is also a childlike wonder at the heart of ‘Kokomo, IN’. The song is a voyage of discovery, a sense of discovering yourself and the world, and a sense of progression, achievement, and movement amongst all the acoustic guitars, pedal steel, shimmering synths, plucked pizzicato strings, and crying violins. Zauner has never delivered a more haunting, loving, caring, or mature vocal.
‘Orlando in Love’ is an obvious sonic progression from ‘Kokomo, IN’. While the new song might have been lyrically inspired by an ancient Italian epic poem, Zauner’s earlier experimentation with string-backed balladry sounds like it owes more of a musical debt to the Chicago alternative-country band Wilco.
It’s no wonder, then, that when Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy joined Japanese Breakfast on stage at the 2022 Pitchfork Music Festival, they played two songs together: Wilco’s timeless ‘Jesus, Etc’ and a song it had so clearly inspired, ‘Kokomo, IN’. And, considering how big of a fan of Wilco Japanese Breakfast so clearly are, it’s no wonder either that the group, and all their inner teenagers, had such huge smiles on their faces all through the performances.
