Melancholy and the Infinite Breakfast

A review of the new Japanese Breakfast album, 'For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)'

Last week, I was listening to the Mazzy Star episode of Bandsplain, an incredibly informative and entertaining podcast hosted by Yasi Salek. Her guest was Meaghan Garvey, who is probably my favorite music writer 2010-present, and in the opening minutes, they were taking about the concept of the "Sadgirl." Here’s Garvey’s definition:

“To be a Sadgirl, I don’t think it necessarily means that you’re going around the world fucking miserable all the time… I think it’s more like: maybe you have a predisposition towards romanticized melancholy, and maybe if you’re able to harness said melancholy and really indulge in it, maybe it’s not so depressing at all and really quite fantastic.”

The next day, I found a promo copy of Japanese Breakfast’s new album in my inbox, and as I cued up my third listen a few hours later, that Garvey quote resurfaced in my mind. This, the fourth Japanese Breakfast album, is called For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)—I already thought the title was a lot, then while writing this paragraph, I learned that this is how it’s actually punctuated. 

It is not a massive bummer of a record. The opening seconds remind me of Sufjan Stevens, but specifically the dewy, lovelorn "Futile Devices" rather than his more depressing material. That song famously moved Stevens to tears during an in-studio performance, and while it's not hard to imagine "Here is Someone" having a similar effect on Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner, we're talking about crying that skews toward the happy end of the spectrum.

Zauner wrote "Here is Someone" following a meteoric rise precipitated by the twin successes of JB's 2021 album Jubilee and her debut book, the memoir Crying in H Mart, released less than a month-and-a-half prior. She has said that her breakneck workaholism helped her cope with her mother's death (which inspired her memoir as well as a good deal of her music), but on this song, she imagines slowing down. "Watching you from the yard," she sings, presumably to her husband and bandmate Peter Bradley, "Life is sad, but here is someone, someone, someone, someone."

Thematically, "Here is Someone" is a fake-out—Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is mostly comprised of character studies that have little to do with Zauner's own life. Here she is in a recent Stereogum interview describing a few of them:

So in “Honey Water” it’s a song about a marriage in which someone has been unfaithful because they’re insatiable in their desires, and how that impacts another person and their relationship. And then there’s a song called “Mega Circuit” about a younger generation of men who feel politically isolated and desire the acceptance from the far right, and the dangers of that. “Orlando In Love” is about a man who falls in love with a siren and kind of just blindly follows that call to his death.

"Here Is Someone" is, however, a fitting overture for the baroque, orchestral album that follows. There are precedents in JB's discography, especially Jubilee's most ornate moments like "Kokomo, IN," "Tactics," and "Posing For Cars," but the degree to which Melancholy Brunettes leans toward chamber pop and away from meat-and-potatoes indie rock still feels unexpected. Industry veteran Blake Mills, who produced, mixed, and played a million instruments on the album, is a major catalyst for this stylistic shift. You can sense obvious echoes of his work with indie stalwarts like Perfume Genius and Feist, as well as the refined gravitas that has led him to backing-band gigs with titans like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. In Melancholy Brunettes, I hear a little Astral Weeks sweep, a little John Cale/Scott Walker pomp, some Natalie Prass music-box charm, and—I'm being serious here—quite a bit of the historical-minded Eurocentrism of Coldplay's Viva La Vida.

Fittingly, some of the album's most baroque flourishes occur on "Orlando in Love," named after 15th Century epic poem Orlando Innamorato, and "Leda," which references the Greek myth of Leda and the swan. The lush, pre-rock instrumentation intersects with Zauner's lyrical themes on these songs, but elsewhere it subtly mutates, often reflecting her integration of lyrics spanning different eras, characters, and locations. Over the course of the album, I sense a slow transition from, for lack of a better term, European Romantic sounds to something distinctly Californian—soft, country-inflected folk-rock a la Laurel Canyon in the '70s. Maybe this wasn't intentional, but closing with a three-song run of the pedal-steel-heavy "Men In Bars," and then songs titled "Winter In LA" and "Magic Mountain," seems to hammer it home.

I can't overstate how gracefully Zauner, Mills, and Co. pull off this blend. They find common ground between two musical styles I've never linked in my head before—one so European, one so American West—and it all sparkles the same. Is that light shining through the stained glass window of a French Cathedral or a Spanish Mission? Is Zauner writing about Magic Mountain the 1924 German novel or Magic Mountain the theme park? Why does American hero Jeff Bridges call a lighter/flashlight a "torch" in the British sense on "Men In Bars," and why does his quavery voice remind me of Britain's own Bryan Ferry?

My absolute favorite song on the album (and of the young year as a whole) is "Picture Window." A shuffling, pedal-steel-drenched golden hour reverie, it's sung from the perspective of someone bent under the burden of trauma who can't fathom how their partner walks through life so carefree and oblivious. "Are you not afraid of every waking minute/That your life could pass you by," Zauner sings, before dredging up the narrator's ghosts in the chorus. The way she depicts this relationship—setting scenes, hinting that there's damage also hiding under the partner's placid surface—is so vivid but so economical, which matches the way the music feels constantly blooming but well-contained, a suite in under three minutes.

Despite my overwhelmingly positive opinion of Melancholy Brunettes, I feel like this is not going to be a critically adored album. I've avoided the few reviews that have already been published, but I have seen a smattering of tweets from other writers and sense a larger excitement void than usual in the lead-up to a Japanese Breakfast album. Maybe time will prove that I'm just "inventing a guy" to defend my position. From Psychopomp onwards, JB's music has been extremely acclaimed, and I've enjoyed-not-loved most of it. The only time I've seen the band live (playing with Alex G in a 300-cap room in 2017) stands as one of my favorite shows of the past decade, but album-wise, three or four songs usually stick for me while I think "This is nice" about the rest. On Jubilee, those songs were the ones I mentioned before, AKA the "baroque" ones. It should make perfect sense why I enjoy hearing Zauner continue down that path.

I've already made a few comparisons to help contextualize Melancholy Brunettes, but I've kept what I think is the most accurate one in my back pocket to whip out at the climax of this review. It's an album I count as formative to my music taste, one that I expounded upon on a podcast a couple of years ago: Rilo Kiley's third album, 2004's More Adventurous. It too followed a critical high-water mark, leaned more heavily into Laurel Canyon lushness and varied character studies, and it also featured a producer (Mike Mogis) who played a million different instruments across the full album. Obviously, it's not a one-to-one comparison (not a lot of European shit on More Adventurous, Zauner and Jenny Lewis are very different as vocalists and songwriters, etc.), but if Melancholy Brunettes is similarly maligned for lacking the grit of its predecessors, lock it in!

As is the case with any artist who writes extensively about personal tragedy, discussions of Zauner's work often attempt to create a narrative for her career, rather than meeting the music at face-value. I don't feel a ton of baggage on Melancholy Brunettes, but maybe others do. Instead, I'm more interested in understanding why I like this album so much when I usually gravitate away from most other modern indie-pop that fits this template: largely acoustic, "writerly" lyrics, and very minimal in the way of rock percussion. As a drummer, I do feel bad for JB stickman/erstwhile producer Craig Hendrix—he's not given a lot to do here, and I can't imagine that playing this material live will be very engaging. But for some reason, I'd take my least favorite Melancholy Brunettes song ("Magic Mountain") over every single Big Thief song any day of the week.

I am, historically, a sucker for baroque pop music, so that might explain it. Or maybe it's because this album arrives at the perfect time of year. I've immensely enjoyed the past week and a half of listening to Melancholy Brunettes as I watch daffodils and tulips start to sprout while walking around wearing considerably fewer layers than I was a month ago. This is an album that blooms. So much for Sadgirl shit; it's Springtime.