Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner believes in aliens.
“Yeah, I do,” she tells the Scene between stops on her tour behind her band’s 2017 album Soft Sounds From Another Planet. “I think the whole album started because I was talking to my friend about aliens and the Mars One project. I have a theory that I became obsessed with — ‘Why haven’t we found aliens yet?’ — and this theory that, similar to mankind, the alien populations became more focused inward and created 3-D spaces or virtual reality spaces for themselves. And so they’re not searching for us, they’re just living in their simulations.”
Zauner laughs when she says it, fully aware that it might sound silly. But burying one’s head in self-created worlds in an effort to escape a harsher reality is a common human experience, and it’s connected to how Japanese Breakfast came to be. Zauner, an Oregon native, attained some national attention as the leader of Philadelphia indie-rock band Little Big League, but she moved back to Oregon in 2013 after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, eventually leaving the band.
Reeling from her mother’s death, Zauner started Japanese Breakfast as a means of staying busy. That resulted in 2016’s Psychopomp, an emotionally raw synth-pop album that at times directly addresses her traumatic loss. “I came here for the long haul / Now I leave here as an empty fucking hole,” she sings on the lush, orchestra-enhanced opener “In Heaven.”
Zauner’s songwriting-as-therapy approach continues on her new album, but with this installment, she isn’t looking inward to explore the vast feelings of emptiness a loved one’s death has left behind. She’s blasting off to float among new worlds, using thick, fuzzy layers of Juno 6 synthesizer, vocoder, Auto-Tuned harmonies, lap steel guitar and more to dabble in everything from straightforward, hook-filled power pop (“12 Steps”), to dreamy, synth-laced instrumentals (“Planetary Ambience”) and unironically sexy ’80s saxophone solos (“Machinist,” a song about a human falling in love with a robot — goddamn, that sax is hot).
Opening track “Diving Woman” starts with vibrating synthesizer and a fluid guitar line that mimics the sparkling dance of a calm sea. Zauner sings in a breathy croon: “I wanna be a woman of regimen / A bride in her home state / A diving woman of Jeju-do.” The song is inspired by the women in the Korean province of Jeju who dive up to 30 meters deep, holding their breath for more than three minutes, harvesting abalone, conch, sea urchins and other edible treasures while braving the threat posed by sharks and jellyfish. “Diving Woman” is as graceful and otherworldly as its subject matter.
“Boyish,” which originally appeared on Little Big League’s 2014 album Tropical Jinx as a fuzzy, guitar-driven rock song, has been rearranged as a gorgeous pop lament. The frustration that comes from unrequited love burns through, but Zauner has turned her pain into something beautiful, with an orchestral arrangement in the song’s chorus that soars with airy, layered harmonies and a gentle doo-wop beat.
The most poignant piece on the record is “The Body Is a Blade.” Zauner’s heartbreak is the focus, but she’s still hopeful, taking comfort in wisdom that you only gain the hard way. With confidence and patience, Zauner sings: “Your body is a blade that moves while your brain is writhing / Knuckled under pain, you mourn / But your blood is flowing.” It’s a lyric that might pop back into your mind if you’re left to stew in your own dark place for too long, and Zauner admits she still isn’t sure if she’s delivering the bittersweet pep talk to herself or trying to reassure the listener. Probably both, she says.
“I didn’t really go to therapy after my mom passed away — I opted for a different type of therapy,” says Zauner. “For me, it was really just shutting off for a couple of years and staying really busy and working really hard and finding ways to express what I was feeling in a productive way. … That’s what that lyric is. I literally saw these traumas as giant blades of grass that I had to move through. I felt so haunted by everything that was going on and what I had witnessed. I had to just, like, run away from stuff, and physically rely on my body to get up in the morning while I worked my way through that.”
Zauner might be right about those aliens and their search for inner peace. From diving into the sea to floating through space to shrinking down among the blades of grass — whatever you have to do to hide from the world and focus on the task at hand — Soft Sounds From Another Planet proves beautiful things can happen when we insist on making our own worlds.
