How Japanese Breakfast Got Jeff Bridges to Sing on Her New Album (Exclusive)

For Michelle Zauner, 2021 was a game-changer year. Not only did she release her critically acclaimed third studio album Jubilee, which earned a Grammy nomination alongside a nod for best new artist, but she also published her first memoir, the New York Times best seller Crying in H Mart, which detailed her vulnerable account of grief after losing her mother to terminal cancer and connecting with her Korean identity.

The success, for her, was surprising. “It changed my life completely,” the 35-year-old artist tells PEOPLE over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn, N.Y. “It gave me tremendous opportunity, validation and financial support.”

It also notably allowed her to become more “courageous” in her creative work because she finally had a “safety net.” 

“In some ways, [what] Crying In H Mart and Jubilee really gave me was [the idea of], ‘Well, I’ve done everything, I’ve achieved everything I wanted and more, and now I just want to make what is exciting to me,'” she explains. 

So when Zauner, who spearheads the shoegazey indie-rock band Japanese Breakfast, began crafting her forthcoming album, it was liberating.

“The moment that you put on this pressure to achieve something in your career or to gain more fans, it’s the moment that your art dies,” the author/musician notes.

Instead, she calls her fourth album For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women) her “artist’s record.” “All I could do is pursue what I’m the most genuinely interested in,” she explains.

Notably, For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women), which was recorded in December 2023, is a departure from her 2021 LP. Upon its announcement, the title — a line from a John Cheever short story — became divisive online. Zauner recalls one person writing, “What label let her do this to herself?” But, according to her, the label, more than anyone, “loved” the title.

“I wanted to have a title that was slightly obnoxious,” she laughs. “I’ve always liked it when artists have slightly annoying titles. I think [Smashing Pumpkins’ album] Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is an annoying title, and [Fiona Apple’s] When the Pawn is an annoying title. There’s a 1975 record called, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It.”

As the title suggests, the songs are not only melancholic but, at times, dissonant. “A lot of people took it literally and in a dumb way,” she says. “The ones that get it, get it, and the ones that don’t, don’t.” Ultimately, Zauner believed the title was a “great descriptor.”

While making the album, Zauner, as she often does, found inspiration in books. She knew she wanted to make a “darker record,” so she read gothic literature and European romanticism and “weirdly” books that fell under the “incel canon umbrella.” She was inspired by a sorrowful café girl in Degas’ “L’absinthe” and the longing and passion of Wuthering Heights. 

In the past, Zauner had solely tapped people who had self-produced their own work or their friends’ bands for her albums. But with her latest project, she knew she wanted to work with a veteran producer. So, Zauner “went on some blind producer dates” in Los Angeles and found she clicked with Blake Mills the most.

Unlike Jubilee, her forthcoming project was largely written on guitar, and that made Mills — a well-known producer, singer-songwriter and session guitarist — an ideal fit for her.

There’s an inherent moodiness that resonates throughout the record. On the string-laden lead single “Orlando in Love,” inspired by the 15th-century Italian poem “Orlando Innamorato,” Zauner tells a tale of a poet who is lured to the sea by a siren. “Mega Circuit,” is a creepy, Fiona Apple-meets-Jewel number that meditates on contemporary masculinity. Meanwhile, the steel pedal-tinged track “Picture Window” ruminates on the idea of caring for someone so much you foreshadow their death.

The album also features “Men in Bars,” a collaboration between her and Jeff Bridges, inspired by Kenny Rogers’ “Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town” and Nick Cave’s “Henry Lee,” which features PJ Harvey. Zauner had envisioned a man and a woman singing at one another from different perspectives and specifically wanted a man who had a “lower register and a lot of character” in his voice. 

“The first name that came up that [Blake and I] were both really excited by just because it was so unexpected and fit the character really well was Jeff Bridges,” she recalls.

But Zauner’s latest album isn’t the only creative project she’s been working on. 

The singer-songwriter, who is half-Korean, spent the entirety of 2024 living in Korea — an experience that will be the bedrock of her next book, which will detail “my year living abroad in Korea and learning the language.” 

The experience of living in Korea was deeply meaningful to Zauner.

“I cried for four days [after] leaving Korea,” she recalls. “I really loved the friends that I made. I was living such a slow life compared to the one that I live when I’m on [the album] cycle.”

News of her book comes amid an update that the film adaptation of Crying in H Mart, which was set to be directed by Will Sharpe, is “on pause” after she told SSENSE earlier this year that she whad been working on the screenplay for a year.

Still, she considered who could portray her on-screen. Her “dream person” would have been Return to Seoul star Ji-Min Park. “I thought she was so incredible in that movie,” says Zauner. “But she is French, so I don’t know if that would’ve worked for that movie.”

What felt like — and remains — the most natural fit to Zauner is the “discovery” of an unknown half-Korean actress who had an inherent “magnetism and intensity” that would kickstart her career. “We needed to find someone like that,” she explains.

But for now, Zauner is trying to remain present, focusing on the challenges of bringing For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women), to life, which is “a very involved record” with “hard songs to play,” and writing her next book that she owes her publisher.

“That’s the main thing right now,” she says, “and I try not to think too far ahead beyond that.”