Japanese Breakfast on a scallop shell: Michelle Zauner and band bring ‘Melancholy’ tour to the Met Philly
It was the first of two nights back in the former hometown of the "Crying in H Mart" author. "Philly made me hard. No one can handle it,” she said.
How do you follow up a success so unlikely that you never even dreamed about it?
Michelle Zauner made it big in 2021 not only with Jubilee, the joyous third album by her band Japanese Breakfast that garnered multiple Grammy nominations, but also with Crying in H Mart, a searing memoir about grief, food, and exploring her Korean identity that became a surprise runaway bestseller.
Zauner grew up in the Pacific Northwest and came East to study at Bryn Mawr College. On Thursday, she was back in the city where Japanese Breakfast made its bones, playing the first of two back-to-back shows at the Met Philadelphia in support of the band’s new album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women). The album‘s title is drawn from a line in John Cheever’s short story “The Chimera.”
With that sumptuous 10-song collection, which came out in March and was recorded in Los Angeles in late 2023, Zauner — not surprisingly — did the smart thing. Rather than trying to duplicate the success of perky alt-pop Jubilee hits like “Be Sweet” and “Paprika,” Zauner chose art over commerce.
She made a lush, artful set of songs that dug into her particular interests, from Gothic literature and Renaissance poetry in “Orlando in Love,” to corrosive contemporary masculinity in “Mega Circuit.”
Using her newfound cultural capital, she connected with simpatico collaborators from producer Blake Mills, who’s worked with Fiona Apple, Bob Dylan, and Bucks County’s Weyes Blood, to legendary drummer Jim Keltner and — in the album‘s most wtf? moment — actor Jeff Bridges.
» READ MORE: Michelle Zauner of Philly’s Japanese Breakfast has a new memoir born of grief and a new album full of joy
At the Met on Thursday, in a show that was slightly less than sold out — tickets for Friday are gone, though available on resale sites — the album was brought to life in a presentation that was both whimsical and marked by impressive subtlety and sophistication.
It began with Zauner strumming a guitar on Melancholy‘s “Here Is Someone” while sitting inside a giant scallop shell, like an indie rock version of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus come to life.
What did it mean? A symbol of artistic fertility? Or a winking joke that, with all her success, she should be happy as a clam?
Zauner has always had a flair for the visual — her band dressed as Lord of the Rings characters for her last Philly show, at the Fillmore on Halloween night in 2023.
At the Met, the mollusk remained on stage for the full 20-song, 80-minute show, with Zauner jumping up and down and inside it on occasion, as in an energized take on Jubilee‘s soccer-inspired romance “Slide Tackle.”
She also banged a trademark gong during an ebullient “Paprika” that was part of a three-song encore. A sign advertising the Melancholy Inn lit up in neon blue during the dual perspective “Men in Bars,” with drummer Craig Hendrix taking on the sad romance vocal duties handled by Bridges on the album.
The Japanese Breakfast band is superb; Zauner is evermore accomplished as a guitarist, switching off between strumming and acoustic and playing her fair share of fiery lead. Her husband, Peter Bradley, takes care of principal guitar duties.
Wrapping up a month-long first leg of the “Melancholy” tour, the band was as cohesive as could be in rousing the album with airy, dreamy soundscapes, with bassist Deven Craige locked in with Hendrix.
Saxophonist Adam Schatz and violinist Lauren Baba both do double duty on keyboards, giving Zauner an arsenal of options to animate Melancholy’s intricate studio creations on stage in real time.
Zauner, whose self-directed video for “Orlando in Love,” featuring her friend Marisa Dabice of Philly band Mannequin Pussy and filmed in part at her Bryn Mawr alma mater, seemed pleased to be back in her old hometown.
Before the delightfully disconsolate “Winter in L.A.,” she said the song was about “being miserable in California. Philly made me hard. No one can handle it.” She also joked that it was “weird to play a venue where there’s not a coat check named after me.”
That was a reference to “The Michelle Zauner Coat Check” at Union Transfer, a post she manned while interning with music promoters R5 Productions in the early 2010s, which was renamed when she played five shows there in 2021. In a full circle moment, Thursday and Friday’s Japanese Breakfast dates are the first shows R5 has ever promoted at the Met.
Zauner, who is at work on a follow-up to Crying in H Mart that will draw on a year she spent living in Korea, immersing herself in the culture and working on her language skills, had one special treat for Philly.
For much of the tour, the band has been performing a cover of Welsh singer Donna Lewis’ 1996 pop hit “I Love You Always Forever.” On Thursday, that was left off the set list. (Hopefully the band will get to it Friday.)
In its place was a song that Zauner said the group had never performed live: a cover of “Playground Love,” by the French duo Air from Sofia Coppola’s 1990 film The Virgin Suicides, that features vocals by Gordon Tracks (a pseudonym for Coppola’s husband, Phoenix singer Thomas Mars.
Zauner and band brought the shimmery chamber rock song off exquisitely, another mood piece to the Melancholy puzzle.
Opener Ginger Root was a blast. In the studio, the group is a one-man band consisting of Huntington Beach, Calif., multi-instrumentalist Cameron Lew. On stage, the keyboard and guitar player was accompanied by a drummer, bassist, and a camera whose visuals were projected on two video screens, which also showed clips of what felt like a charmingly comical student film.
Lew’s four albums, the most recent being last year’s Shinbangumi, are characterized as indie-soul but you could just as easily characterize it as part of another cheeky traction-gaining category: yacht rock. Songs like “Show 10” skillfully work a funk groove, while maintaining a pleasingly mellow sheen.
The singer also told a charming story about doing SXSW in Austin, Texas, in 2018, “playing pool parties where there was nobody at the pool.” He was still in college, and had a term paper to write on the way home about a piece of music that had changed his life. His subject? Japanese Breakfast’s 2016 album Psychopomp.