Seven years ago, when Michelle Zauner was a 25-year-old freelance rocker pushing her way into the Philadelphia DIY scene – working three part-time jobs to pay her $ 300 a month rent and save for touring self-reserved – his bassist delivered a heartbreaking news: he was leaving his rambling quartet, Little Big League, for another band that would certainly become, in his words, “Jimmy Fallon big”.

Riffing on this hit, Zauner wrote a dark synth song called “Jimmy Fallon Big!” and included it in his second feature film under the Japanese Breakfast moniker, “Soft Sounds From Another Planet” in 2017. This summer, celebrating the release of his brilliant third album, “Jubilee” – which arrived just two weeks later his devastating memories of grief, food and Korean-American identity, “Crying in H Mart“debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list – she proved” Jimmy Fallon Big! “to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Are we ‘Jimmy Fallon Big’?” The Roots joked, before Zauner and his band got into the song by performing it in “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon”.

“I think it’s a very Korean part of me, that my feelings of greater success are rooted in some sort of revenge story,” Zauner laughs.

She has already surpassed this fantasy in many ways. With dream-pop adorned with “Jubilee,” Japanese Breakfast is nominated for two Grammy Awards – for best new alternative artist and album. When I contacted her by phone last week, she was in the Adirondacks on a writing retreat with her husband, where she was working on the script for “Crying in H Mart”, which was recently cast for the big screen. .

“I felt like I had a one in a thousand chance,” she recalls on the day of the appointment. “I saw it and I panicked – I screamed so loud.”

For Zauner, it was especially significant that one of her nominations was announced by K-pop BTS megastars and that she was able to send the video to her Aunt Nami, whom she talks about extensively in her memoir.

“Even my aunt in her sixties in Seoul, Korea knows the Grammys,” she says. “It was a perfect scenario for me.”

In “Crying in H Mart”, Zauner traces an overwhelming emotional journey, exploring how Korean cuisine kept her in tune with her heritage as her mother died of cancer in 2014, and how cooking brought her to life. always been since. But it’s also a flawless look at how death makes us re-evaluate our dreams and brings out our relationships, ambitions, and sacrifices. As Zauner recounts the boredom of the high school suburbs and her months as babysitter for her mother during chemotherapy, she develops piercing details of her lyrics to prepare for her first songs like “In Heaven” and “Rugged Country”. When Zauner writes: “I could be the closest thing [my mother] must have left a piece of herself behind ”, it’s hard not to hear tribute notes resonating in every song of“ Jubilee ”.

“It was as if the world had split into two different types of people: those who had felt pain and those who had still felt it,” she wrote of the shared grief of her. and her aunt in “H Mart”, a sentiment that echoes almost verbatim in the lyrics of “Jubilee” climax, “Posing in Bondage.”

Zauner started playing guitar as a teenager in Eugene, Oregon, writing serious songs – galvanized by “all the independent heroes of the 2000s” like Elliott Smith, Ben Gibbard, Jenny Lewis and Phil Elverum – in a series promising groups who have never really taken an airplane trip. She moved east to study Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College, an all-female institution, and started Japanese Breakfast in 2013 with a song-a-day project called “June”. “I had three jobs, so there were times when I had 20 minutes to write and record a song,” she says. “I realized that a lot of the work as an artist comes up everyday and puts itself forward, and not just while waiting for things to happen. Much of my success is due to not being embarrassed about being bad, learning from it, and doing my best to improve myself.

On the Bandcamp page for their 2014 “Where Is My Great Big Feeling?” EP, she wrote: “I hope that anyone else who has lost or is struggling with a family member or friend with cancer can perhaps find some comfort in these s — lo fi songs. ” A banner at the top now heroically reads “2x Grammy Nominee”.

Zauner initially saw Japanese Breakfast’s debut LP in 2016, “Psychopomp”, as his swan song. “I had gone through three big band breaks. There is so much difficulty in being a DIY musician – so many uncomfortable nights popping in beehives because the floor you sleep on is covered in cat hair or watching your $ 10,000 van get towed away – and what ‘a group eventually quitting is so disheartening. I was like, “When do you give up on this?” “When“ Psychopom ”took off – anchored by the sparkling pain of“ The Woman Who Loves You, ”a ballad inspired by Wong Kar’s“ Happy Together ”movie -wai and ‘Silver Springs’ by Fleetwood Mac – she took nothing for granted. “I treated success like such a precious gift,” she said. “It’s not something that has never occurred to me. easily.

“After my mother passed away, I became really obsessed with my job as a way to grieve and stay afloat mentally,” Zauner adds. “I put all my capital into ambition, because I was afraid that if I didn’t stay afloat, I would never be able to escape this emotional darkness.”

Evoking the crisp indie-pop hooks of Rilo Kiley and, at times, the shoegaze surf, “Jubilee” was recorded in a frigid Philadelphia warehouse studio with co-producer Craig Hendrix, a Berklee-trained multi-instrumentalist with which she has collaborated with since her Little Big League days. The duo played every instrument on 2017’s “Soft Sounds”, but recruited others, such as Alex G (“Zauner’s favorite contemporary musician”), for “Jubilee”.

The isolated writing process of “Crying in H Mart” provided perspective, renewing Zauner’s love for the music creation process. Eager to surpass herself and grow as a musician, she studied music theory and took guitar lessons to expand her possibilities on “Jubilee”. She brought “Beatles math” to songs like bittersweet “Kokomo, IL” (performed by Jeff Tweedy this summer), arranged for strings and horn, and turned to art-pop iconoclasts with vast palettes of inspiration. “I was really concerned, what did Kate Bush do? What did Björk do? I realized I could be weird.

“The music gave me the confidence to write the book – it gave me the confidence to do whatever I’m doing now,” she adds.

As Zauner’s audience grows larger than ever anticipated, she sees the common thread of her work – which, after dozens of songs and hundreds of pages dealing with grief, finds a happier path. in “Jubilee” – as a continuing interest in storytelling.

“It comes from being a very sensitive person, very moved by ordinary human experiences and relationships,” says Zauner. “It comes from wanting to be understood, or wanting people to feel what you feel so desperately, and looking for some kind of permanent meaning.”