By Peter Larsen

Copyright stltoday

Peter Larsen
The Orange County Register

For Michelle Zauner, hard work was just part of the job as leader of the indie band Japanese Breakfast.

When all that started to pay off in 2021, with her breakout album “Jubilee” and the acclaimed memoir “Crying in H Mart,” life suddenly got a lot easier.

So why, she wondered, didn’t things feel better?

“Suddenly, I had developed really bad stage fright,” Zauner says.

Before, she drove the car from gig to gig, sold band merch after the show each night and served as her own tour manager, she says.

“As we got bigger, all of those responsibilities whittled down to just the core of what talent I had to offer, and I think that really scared me,” Zauner says. “I suddenly was very fixated on the mistakes I actually could make that were just my own, and not because I was tired from driving or carrying gear.”

Her anxiety on stage as the “Jubilee” Tour wound through 2022 and into a year of mostly festival dates in 2023 wasn’t just mental, either.

“It manifested itself in really strange physical ways,” Zauner says. “I had a lot of stomach pain and was just really stressed out and sad. I think the only way to solve it was kind of to take some time.”

Which is exactly what she did, leaving the United States in December 2023 to move to South Korea, the birthplace of her late mother, to study the Korean language, spend time with her husband (Japanese Breakfast guitarist Peter Bradley) and step away from the stresses of the road for a full year.

Earlier this year, Japanese Breakfast released its fourth album, “For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women),” and returned to the road for a tour that will include a stop at the Pageant on Oct. 6.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Zauner talked about her year in South Korea, playing near the DMZ, and how she recorded a duet with actor-singer Jeff Bridges yet has never been in the same room with him.

So, how has your time on the road this year been going?

Zauner: It’s been great. You know, I took a yearlong hiatus, and I think it sort of renewed an appreciation of playing live music.

I know you’d been thinking of going to South Korea to immerse yourself in the language and culture. When you left in December 2023, what was it like in those first months there?

It was so fun. I think it’s always felt like a second home to me. (Zauner was born in South Korea to a white father and South Korean mother, she was raised in Oregon where her parents moved when she was 9 months old.)

My manager’s like, “You’re going to be begging me for work after a couple of months.” I really enjoyed living a very simple life. I was just a student for a year.

You played a set at the DMZ Peace Festival near the border with North Korea. Did you play much in South Korea? What’s it like?

It’s so special. I don’t know if I’ve played a concert in Korea and not sobbed massively during or after that performance. I think this is our fourth time playing in Korea, and this is a really special festival. It’s not in the city, it’s sort of out in the countryside, and it’s not on the DMZ (Korean Demilitarized Zone, a fortified buffer zone between North and South Korea), but it’s towards the north.

Apparently, it rains every year, and it was just this massive — none of us had ever seen anything like it — just massive downpour when we played. My aunt came, who’s such a special person to me.

I had learned this song that’s so beautiful by this artist named Kim Jung Mi that I’d been wanting to cover. It’s just called “The Sun.” And so I was singing this song I’d spent so much time to really nail and memorize all the Korean lyrics in this downpour.

And they start the most, like, wholesome mosh pit I’ve ever seen, where they’re just running in a circle. They’re not pushing each other, just running in a circle. And my aunt, who I’m dying to get inside or to the side stage, is in front in a little poncho. Someone’s given her a sign that says, “Life is sad but here is Japanese Breakfast,” and it’s just her dead-front and center, looking at me. It was such a special, sweet moment.

Let’s talk about the new record. Coming off “Jubilee,” was it a conscious decision to do more sort of acoustic pieces, more guitars?

I knew I really wanted to have a guitar album. I think part of the reason why “Jubilee” was quite uncomfortable for me was because it was so joyful and so extroverted and really required me to be this singer I had no intention of being. Even the lead single (“Be Sweet”) was just so difficult for me to sing and was just so poppy.

So I wanted to make something just more naturally introverted, and I wanted to be back behind a guitar again. Safely behind a guitar.

Blake Mills, who’s worked with everyone from Bob Dylan and Lucy Dacus to Fiona Apple and Joni Mitchell, produced the new record, and you recorded it at Sound City, both of which are kind of new things for you, I think.

I felt like it was kind of the ace up my sleeve that I’d never done something like this before. I knew going in that this was going to have a level of fidelity that I had never put out before, and I really just wanted to work with someone that was gonna direct a little. I wanted to really bring in a new voice.

I have to ask you about “Men in Bars,” your duet with Jeff Bridges, which is terrific and unexpected. How’d that come to be?

I wrote that song a long time ago, and I always knew I wanted it to be a duet between a man and a woman. It’s almost like you’re getting two different perspectives of the same events.

I really wanted this masculine, working man’s voice, and Blake and I couldn’t agree on a good person for the entirety of the recording sessions up until the last week, when out of nowhere, he remembered he had worked on (Bridges’) record. Then he texted him, and within a couple of hours, he video-chatted us and was just really down. He’s a music lover and a cool guy, and that’s how that happened.

I know he did his part remotely. Have you met him yet?

No. I feel so awful because I actually had stationery made to send him a handwritten letter to thank him and send with the record. And it was one of those things that you make too precious of a thing and then it falls by the wayside. But I’ve actually written out this letter now, and I think I’m going to send it this week. So I don’t know, maybe someday I’ll meet him.