COVER STORY

I’ve witnessed a legend in the making exactly once. It was the
day before my junior-year finals, the last gasp of a spring f ling-es-
que weekend in 2010. I left my suburban Philadelphia school and
ventured down the road, past the mix of high-end boutiques and
greasy pizza places that comprise much of the Main Line, to bucolic
Br yn Mawr College. Sprawled out on a friend’s blanket and wine-
drunk, I heard Michelle Zauner sing for the first time.
That voice, at once strained and soaring, comforting and damn-
ing, f lew straight from the stage and into my consciousness. She
played guitar and sang with her then-band Post Post, a poppy indie
quartet whose buoyant synths and interlocking dance rhy thms
filled the air. Zauner commandeered the stage with a swagger and
conviction that few of the other talented local college bands pos-
sessed. I don’t remember the song, but I can recall the exhilaration
I felt watching her perform—and the sense that maybe, just maybe,
something big was afoot.
Indeed, it was. Over the inter vening nine years, Zauner started
another band, moved coasts, lost a parent, got married and
launched a solo career. Her 2017 album, Soft Sounds from Another
Planet, her second under the Japanese Breakfast moniker, offers
listeners the most sonically evocative landscapes of her career
yet. Her poetr y reaches new heights of candor and inventiveness,
with lyrics like “I can’t get you of f my mind/ I can’t get you of f in gen-
eral,” which offer a devastating, tongue-in-cheek portrayal of
unrequited love. That refrain comes from “Boyish,” whose prom-

movie-meets-queer-Bildungsroman music video Zauner directed

and screened at South By Southwest last year. Along the way, the

30-year-old recording artist has earned a global fandom without

losing her DIY cred, achieved fashion icon status and offered Asian

American millennials a rock star in their own image. Fitting any

pre-set mold hasn’t ever been her style.

Zauner’s musical career began during her childhood in Eugene,

Oregon. Her Korean mother and white father, who met in Seoul,

enrolled her in piano lessons when she was 5. “I had grand visions of

being a pianist in elementar y school, but I didn’t actually put in the

work,” she says. “I was honestly ver y bad at piano. I hated learning

about music theor y, and I was a bad student.”

Despite her disinclination for the ivor y keys, her love of music

never let up, and she started taking guitar lessons at the age of 16.

“I wanted to write songs,” she says. “It just came naturally to me,

like, ‘Oh, you only need three chords to make a song? Here we go!’ I

didn’t know many people who were making songs, so I felt like I had

free rein to make silly, stupid songs.”

When Zauner was in high school, the anti-folk subgenre was in

its heyday, and artists like Kimya Dawson and Joanna Newsom

were rejecting traditional folk’s stylistic constraints in favor of

irreverent experimentation. Zauner says these artists helped illu-

minate where her own idiosyncratic vocals could take her.

Diving into the DIY world also offered an alternative to her high

school life in Eugene, a town known for being progressive but is

Best Served

Raw

With her second critically acclaimed album, a book deal based on her

2018 New Yorker essay and a travel series on Vice, you might think

Japanese Breakfast just arrived with a boom. In reality, Michelle Zauner

has hustled for close to a decade.

TEXT BY SAMEER RAO
PHOTOS BY DORA SOMOSI