Japanese Breakfast’s “Orlando in Love” Marks New Cinematic, Gothic-Inspired Era

After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts, Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), due March 21st on Dead Oceans, marks the band’s first proper studio release.

Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills — an innovator of uncommon subtlety, known for his work with everyone from Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple and quietly regarded as many a legacy artist’s favorite guitar player — and tracked at the venerable Sound City in Los Angeles — birthplace of After The Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac and Nevermind among other classics — the record sees front-woman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined its predecessor Jubilee to examine the darker waves that roil within, the moody, fecund field of melancholy, long held to be the psychic state of poets on the verge of inspiration.

The result is an artistic statement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel.

Listen to “Orlando in Love”
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For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in Zauner’s life during which her GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions.

Reflecting on that success, Zauner came to appreciate the irony of desire, which so often commingles bliss and doom. “I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” she says. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die.”

The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album’s characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. On the album’s lead single “Orlando in Love” — a riff on John Cheever’s riff on Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo — the hero is a well meaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to a siren’s call, his 69th canto (even in the lofty realm of classical myth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo).

Keep an eye out for more from For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), and for more Japanese Breakfast in the meantime, if you haven’t read Crying in H Mart yet, I strongly recommend.

It’s a beautiful, “brutiful” chronicle of growing up of mixed AAPI descent, the cultural nuances of immigrant parents vs Americanized, and of grief. Zauner writes honestly and poignantly about it all. Whether you’re a seasoned Japanese Breakfast fan, or discovering their music now, enjoy!

Listen to “Orlando in Love”
Pre-Save For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)