OKLAHOMA CITY – Pack your tissues, steel your heart, and warm up your singing voice, because indie-pop breakouts Japanese Breakfast are set to hit the Tower Theatre stage on Wednesday, October 8th.
Already known for their brand of piercingly emotional, lush art-pop, Japanese Breakfast – led by singer/songwriter/guitarist/sometime author Michelle Zauner – cranked up the romance and storytelling on their newest album “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)”.
And that’s exactly the tone they’ve been carrying onto the stage each night.
With a six-piece band incorporating violin and saxophone, and a fully realized stage show that Zauner describes as more “theatrical” than ever before, Japanese Breakfast are angling to capture something new, even for their most ardent fans that have watched them evolve since their 2016 debut.
“We’re in good fighting form right now,” Zauner told me over the phone ahead of what will be the final leg of an extended tour on the back of “For Melancholy Brunettes” that will see the band opening for pop superstar Chappell Roan before swinging through OKC.
“I think this is something really special,” she said. “It’s been a lot of time really figuring out the right flow for this show and I’m pretty proud of the way that we’ve integrated these songs into our old catalog, because I think it’s a really nice, dynamic narrative that flows really well.”
That kind of narrative approach is nothing new for Zauner, of course. In addition to her often story-centric and character-oriented songs and lyrics, she also saw significant attention for her debut memoir, 2021 bestseller “Crying in H Mart,” opening up about the grief and difficulty following her mother’s death to cancer and her own reconnection to her Korean heritage.
Her willingness to confront that same level of emotion – and to often recontextualize it through character narratives and shifting perspectives in her songs – helped to bring a surge of interest to her band. But it also serves as a bridge of connection to her fans every night, even when it’s sometimes still painful to access the feelings that inspired the songs.
“There are some songs that are still quite hard for me to sing,” she said. “There’s a song called ‘The Body is a Blade’ that that still hits me sometimes, but it’s mostly a song that makes me feel really proud of enduring what I went through and coming out on the other side. I think that’s one really beautiful thing about music. And I sort of feel that way about grief, too, where something that was once really hard for me is something I really value now.”
That’s an evolution that longtime fans of the band can see manifested even visually in this tour’s new stage show, unfolding with a vivid, Renaissance painting-style backdrop, stage props, and moments of banter and scripted chaos to keep the audience on their toes.
It’s a long way from the first-ever Japanese Breakfast show in Oklahoma, headlining a side stage in a parking lot behind Opolis for the 2018 Norman Music Festival, just a scrappy four-piece indie-rock band with some simple lights and early buzz.
But for this newest outing (dubbed “The Melancholy Tour”,) Zauner is fully embracing the romantic and expressionistic side of her music – and of her own personality – more than ever before.
“It’s been really fun bringing this together,” she said. “The songs feel sort of like short stories, and they’re very narrative-based, and at times quite quiet. So we added a lot of small moments of theatricality, and our stage production is a big part of the show, which we haven’t really ever had before.”
For their OKC fans, it’ll actually be a lucky break to catch the band so deeply in their element on the tour’s final leg, after they’ve had plenty of time to tune and re-tool the show and develop it into something particularly special, tight, and hopefully powerfully emotional.
“Even up until this last tour, we were kind of moving things around trying to find the perfect kind of flow to the show,” Zauner said. “So it’s nice that for this last one, we’ve kind of landed, I think, on something really great.”
Japanese Breakfast bring The Melancholy Tour to Tower Theatre on Wednesday, October 8th with support from SPELLING.
For times, tickets, and more, visit japanesebreakfast.rocks and towertheatreokc.com.
You can find out about local music and performance happenings in the OKC metro weekly in this music column by Brett Fieldcamp. | Brought to you by True Sky Credit Union.
Brett Fieldcamp is our Arts and Entertainment Editor. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for 15+ years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
