Michelle Zauner is the bestselling author behind the sublime, eclectic indie-pop of JAPANESE BREAKFAST – now featuring new pals Blake Mills, Jim Keltner and Jeff Bridges. With late-blooming fame informed by a traumatic bereavement, she’s in a hurry to create. “I feel like there’s so little time,” she tells DORIAN LYNSKEY.

AS A TEENAGER IN EUGENE, OREGON, MICHELLE ZAUNER’S MUSICAL ambitions were modest. She dreamt of touring in a van, staying in Holiday Inns and maybe, one day, headlining the 1,500-capacity Crystal Ballroom in Portland. “That place felt enormous to me,” she says, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her Brooklyn apartment, all in black, a wall of art behind her. “I’m so far beyond what I could have ever hoped for.”

By the time she turned 33 in March 2022, she appeared to have made it. Jubilee, her colourfully pop-minded third album as Japanese Breakfast, was up for two Grammy awards. Crying In H Mart, her memoir about food, Korean-American identity and the loss of her mother to cancer, spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Yet all this recognition was proving discombobulating, she confessed to Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy in a conversation for Interview magazine: “I’ve been feeling a little lost. I feel like I’ve hit my peak and it’s all downhill from here.”

Zauner hoots when she’s reminded of the quote. She is warm and energetic company, with a bright, brilliant laugh. “Why do I think that way? As soon as something great happens, I’m certain that I’ll enter my flop era. I never anticipated that much attention and praise so I’m certain that it’s over.” She pauses. “Hopefully it’s not.”

Zauner has identified each Japanese Breakfast album with a core emotional theme: 2016’s Psychopomp was grief, 2017’s Soft Sounds From Another Planet was trauma, and Jubilee was joy. The heart of her fourth, For Melancholy Brunettes (And Sad Women), is, as advertised, melancholy: “a romantic quality but also an eeriness,” she says. Recorded at Sound City in Los Angeles with producer Blake Mills, it’s a reaction to being “this joyful frontwoman bouncing around” on Jubilee. She wanted to get back to playing guitar and looking inward.