The Melancholic Sound of Success

In 2024, Michelle Zauner decided she needed a break and went to Korea. Over the year, the musician and author became a regular at classic Seoul eateries; studied Korean at Sogang University—and spent a lot of time allowing herself to be sad.

Though Zauner had been an indie pop star in music since debuting under the moniker Japanese Breakfast in 2016, it wasn’t until 2022 that she accomplished several other ambitions she’d long dreamed of: in just one year, she released Crying in H Mart, a memoir about her mother’s death, to critical and award-winning acclaim. Zauner’s third album, Jubilee, earned her a mainstream fan base, plus two Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album, and yet she felt lost and unfulfilled.

She began grappling with her success. At the time, she was reading Frankenstein and was struck by how deeply she resonated with the titular mad scientist. “It was hard to not interpret it through the lens of what I was feeling, which was: I’m being consumed by my passions,” Zauner says over a Zoom from her home in Brooklyn on a mid-January afternoon.

Sitting with those feelings of sadness and desire, the 35-year-old crafted her new album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), out March 21. The project, she says, was in part inspired by the European romanticism she saw in museums on tour and in a sweeping range of classic literature she’d read during her downtime, from Wuthering Heights to The Magic Mountain. (The LP’s “tongue in cheek” title is from a John Cheever short story.) The “incel canon”—books like Infinite Jest—spoke to her, too, thinking of young men with “troubling ideologies” as being “the gothic novel of our times.” Mostly, though, she thought of what one can do with their melancholy and what can come from it, like great art.

Now, Zauner feels more grounded. Though she’s chipping away at her next book about her experience studying Korean, and wrote the screenplay for the Crying in H Mart film adaptation for which she’ll also pen original music, it’s as if she’s no longer consumed by her passions—but letting them be her guide.

Marie Claire: Your new album comes after experiencing mainstream success and becoming a name in the publishing world. Did you feel pressure when you shifted your focus back to music, or did it feel like coming home in a way?

Michelle Zauner: Whenever I feel pressure, I try to respond by following whatever feels most exciting and natural to me and focus on returning to that.

I felt a lot of pressure even after [my first album] Psychopomp, which at the time felt like such a huge mainstream moment for me. It felt like I had a lot of pressure on [2017’s] Soft Sounds from Another Planet, and the way I responded to that was to pursue what I was interested in.

When I think about a fourth album, it feels very much like an artist record, and that’s really what I wanted. After touring Jubilee for three years, there were a lot of things that I wanted to return to. One in particular was getting to play the guitar again. A lot of times, I was being a frontwoman and singing, and that was a difficult role for me because I’ve never really been excited by that title. I’ve never really identified as a singer. In some ways, it feels like this tone of music is more my natural state right now.

MC: Jubilee was about joy, and on For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), you’re singing about sadness and desire. Why did the pendulum swing?

MZ: I was living in a paradox for the past three years. I felt like I won the lottery twice over with my last two projects and got everything I wanted. But I was so frightened and miserable—and am hesitant to talk about it too much because it’s a pretty unrelatable narrative. Oh, all my dreams came true and it was so hard.

I recognized what a huge privilege and opportunity I had and suddenly I was very afraid of bungling it. I had really terrible stage fright and a lot of health problems. I was very work-obsessed and it was joyful but also a difficult time in my life. In some ways, this sad pensiveness feels like my neutral state and what I wanted to sing about.

MC: Was the album always going to focus on these melancholic feelings?

MZ: Originally, I wanted to make a creepy album. Then I wrote “Honey Water” and “Mega Circuit,” and it was difficult for me to conjure any more creepy songs. Based on what I was reading and the art I was consuming, it became like a series of moral tales about people who lose the balance of their lives and are lured by temptation, be it an affair or success or the promise of the incel ideology, because they’ve gone too far in one direction. That was something I was grappling with. If I keep being this work-obsessed and keep chasing this all the way to its end, I’m going to fall into the water.

MC: You’ve written a lot about grief and sadness throughout your career. How do you feel about mining sadness for your art nowadays?

MZ: I was really lucky I had it as this anchor to cling to after my mom died. Since I was 16, writing songs about my friend hanging out with other people [who] weren’t me, I was always using it as a way to work out my feelings. I don’t know if I would feel a purpose in this world without having that for myself.

I don’t know if I subscribe to the idea that you have to have tragedy or sadness or turbulence in order to write music or make good art, but I have no qualms with using that. It comes from a very honest and pure place; it’s just a way to work them out, really. And people find themselves in that space because often the personal is quite universal.

MC: If you could share one piece of advice for “the melancholy brunettes and sad women” looking for solace, what would it be?

MZ: I was reading somewhere that back in the day, [melancholy] was looked at as either a vice or condition, before we were calling it what it was. I also read that artists interpreted it as the feeling right before inspiration strikes. When I think about the melancholy brunettes and sad women, I think of the Brontës and Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf and all of the great women writers who had some condition they suffered with, largely because of their times and limitations. I’ve always identified with that. My advice would be to create out of that.

MC: Do you use a different part of your brain to write music versus a book versus a screenplay, or to create visual art, like the music videos you direct?

MZ: Yes and no. All of it comes down to your personal taste and learning how to listen to what you think is good and, if you’re honest with yourself, is not so good, and what you think will be timeless and what feels hokey. That internal barometer is always the same.

One super-big difference is when I’m trying to do something in prose or when I was working on the screenplay, I read a lot of screenplays and a lot of books that were trying to accomplish exactly what I was trying to do. I would never do that with music. If I was like, I want to make an interesting indie rock record, I would never go listen to a bunch of interesting indie rock records and try to figure out how they were doing it and how to apply it to what I was doing, for fear of ripping people off or not making something that felt true to me. There's more of an intuitive expression that comes with writing music than accompanies prose, which I think takes a lot longer, has more revision process, and looks more to references. My music needs to come from this place that only exists internally and is not influenced by anything but the things I've naturally mixed up in my life.

With writing prose or in a screenplay, it’s more surgical. I’m literally looking, like, How does Richard Ford write about the weather? How does Marilynne Robinson write about her sister taking something from her that she doesn’t want her to take? How does Joan Didion write about grief?

MC: In writing about personal topics or complex emotions, do you ever think about your mother’s advice that you wrote about in Crying in H Mart to always save 10 percent of yourself?

MZ: There are definitely things that I save for myself. It might not seem like it, but I do. My husband gave me really great advice when I was writing Crying in H Mart. There were a few passages that gave me pause, [and he said] to write it and decide later on if that's something that you feel comfortable with sharing. More often than not, the things that give you pause or feel borderline taboo are often the things that connect with people the most.

MC: Is there a craft you’ve yet to master and want to try?

MZ: I would like to write fiction for screen—something a little less based on my life, either for TV or a movie. All of my directing experience has robbed me of the one thing
I feel really confident in, which is my writing. There’s no dialogue, obviously, in music videos. So I think the next territory I’m flirting with exploring is doing something narrative for the screen and directing it.

MC: You’re a big sci-fi fan. Would you ever write and direct a sci-fi project?

MZ: Yes, actually. I don't have anything on the books and there are no offers or anything, but that's something in my next 10 years I think I will pursue.

MC: How do you feel about your work now, after wrestling with it for so long but having so many projects lined up?

MZ: I would feel so untethered if I didn’t have a project or some sense of purpose in this life. I always feel like, This is the last one. And then I have some idea that completely consumes me and I feel like there’s so little time on this Earth to complete it. It’s so infuriating and exciting and inspiring that I don’t know if that feeling is ever going to go away.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.