A Deep Dive (ha ha) into Japanese Breakfast's Bandcamp: Gaining Inspiration from Early Works
If you know me, you know I am a huge fan of Japanese Breakfast. Michelle Zauner is an incredible songwriter, musician, and composer, and I have been lucky enough to get to see her perform twice; the first time, I got to work tech for her solo performance at Brandeis APAHM!
As my own band, Sproutfit, works on recording our first album, I have been going through the majority of Japanese Breakfast's early discography, trying to glean a sense of how she got from recording a-song-a-day in the month of June to producing one of the most impressive albums I have ever heard with my own ears, Soft Sounds From Another Planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20iCZeU35eQ&list=OLAK5uy_kvYKKaMlrdlcu49F4cjfa3julL2osOtNw.
Going through her early works, I found some beginnings of a couple of full-blown indie masterpieces I know and love, so if that's what you're into, here you go:
- Zauner's first band, Little Big League, put out the song Boyish on their album Tropical Jinx: https://runforcoverrecords.bandcamp.com/track/boyish. After the band stopped touring, Zauner revisited a snippet of the song in her Day 6 June recording: https://michellezauner.bandcamp.com/album/june. The June version is so incredibly different from the one on Tropical Jinx, but very very clearly the beginning of the version that would become the space-prom classic on Soft Sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3bjPGUDl1k&list=OLAK5uy_kvYKKaMlrdlcu49F4cjfa3julL2osOtNw&index=6 (if you pay attention to the music video, Leslie Bear, bassist in the band at the time, is in there, who records as Long Beard, and Lindsey Jordan (Snail Mail) plays one of the cheerleaders!
- The release after June, Where is My Big Great Feeling? is a collection of nine songs Zauner recorded as part of a blog with Eskimeaux (Gabby's World), Florist, Frankie Cosmos, and Small Wonder: https://may5to12songs.tumblr.com/. Song 3, My Mommy is Sick (https://michellezauner.bandcamp.com/track/my-mommy-is-sick), ultimately became my current favorite song of all time, The Body is a Blade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmXnuD-JpOs&list=OLAK5uy_kvYKKaMlrdlcu49F4cjfa3julL2osOtNw&index=9.
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