
Japanese Breakfast
Pioneer Courthouse Square
∙
Portland
Tuesday, August 11 at 7 pm PDT
Rock
Concert Venue
Tuesday, August 11 at 7 pm PDT
Rock
Concert Venue
Entry Options
Details
Artists
Description
This Event is All Ages and General Admission.
Please note, Print at Home or Mobile Delivery tickets are restricted to a 14 day delivery delay prior to the performance. Tickets purchased in excess of the posted ticket limit are subject to cancellation without notice.
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), 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.
For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in Zauner’s life during which her 2x 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.”
Sadness is indeed the dominant emotional key of this record, but it is sadness of a rarified form: the pensive, prescient sadness of melancholy, in which the recognition of life’s essentially tragic character occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty. Zauner finds space enough inside it for glimmers of hope. They are the consolations of mortals that poets before her have called out to and that poets after will continue to rediscover: love and labor, and though they run like tonic resolutions through the record’s many episodes, they sound most saliently on its final song, “Magic Mountain,” an engagement with Thomas Mann’s famous novel of the same name. Mann’s book is about a hapless young man, Hans Castorp, who checks in for a brief visit to a tuberculosis sanatorium and finds himself unable to leave for a period of seven years. Zauner reimagines herself as Hans and her artistic body of work as the mountain looming over her. It became a personal song, she says, “about confronting the narcissism that goes into being an artist and deciding I didn't want it to destroy my potential for having a happy life.” For her, making any work feels like scaling a mountain, but from the perch of For Melancholy Brunettes, she surveys the future. “Bury me beside you,” she sings to her beloved, “In the shadow of my mountain.”
This Event is All Ages and General Admission.
ALL SALES ARE FINAL. PLEASE, DOUBLE CHECK YOUR ORDER BEFORE PURCHASING. NO REFUNDS.


