Japanese Breakfast Find The Bliss In Melancholy At The Santa Barbara Bowl
- Josh Kitchen
- 17 hours ago
- 3 min read
By: Josh Kitchen / August 25, 2025
"Life is sad, but here is someone, someone, someone," Michelle Zauner repeats to close "Here Is Someone," the opening track of Japanese Breakfast's fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (And Sad Women). It's a quiet and contemplative track; the melancholic, dirge-like song sets the scene for the rest of the album. Melancholy Brunettes is not a sad album—wistful maybe, but it's one where she finds peace in feeling sad. “I don’t even think of it as a negative, depressive thing, but as a more reflective, realistic state of looking at your life and the world,” Zauner told Vogue this year. We all feel sad sometimes, some people more than others, but along with those feelings of sorrow come joy, light, and beauty.
So, when Zauner walked onto the stage at the Santa Barbara Bowl this past Saturday and onto a massive white seashell centered on stage, carrying a red lantern, she began the show singing "Here Is Someone," setting the scene for an evening that would find Zauner and company churning through heavy and inward material, but with real moments of bliss sprinkled heavily throughout—just like the album it opens. After "Here Is Someone," the band played the second song from the record, where the title comes from—"Orlando in Love":
As if the sea had bore her to be an ideal woman / She came to him from the water like Venus from a shell / Singing his name with all the sweetness of a mother / Leaving him breathless and then drowned.
Here we see why Zauner sits in the massive shell, flanked by the rest of the band behind waves staged like Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. Like Venus, Zauner then emerges and launches into the heavy third track from Brunettes, "Honey Water," another dirge-like meditation that finds her droning the lyrics, "So it goes, I don't mind," over and over. "Honey Water" is a meditation on accepting what you can't change without having to sacrifice your dignity. After this moody and heavy opening three-pack, Zauner reminds the audience that the band has been making great tongue-in-cheek confessional indie-pop gems for quite a while now, playing the early fan favorite "Road Head." From there, the show began to feel a lot like life: with its highs and lows, but where the highs were as high as you can get, and the lows were merely songs about being sad in a way that feels incredibly cathartic. Zauner paused after a few songs to proclaim how wild it was that she's a professional musician, and soaking it all in: "I can't believe we get to do this for our job!"
Brunettes is Japanese Breakfast's first album since the one-two punch of Zauner's crushing literary debut Crying in H Mart—which detailed her mother's death from cancer and her self-discovery from growing up in her mixed household in Philadelphia and with her mother's family in Korea. (It's not for the faint of heart, and it will destroy you, but I can't recommend the audiobook enough, which Zauner reads.) Then came her third album, Jubilee, released shortly after, which launched her into musical superstardom. Where Jubilee was a joyous treatise on love and the sensual freedom found in living, Brunettes is the comedown—but the necessary follow-up—proving you can have all the feelings Zauner sings about on Jubilee, even when the mood shifts.
Throughout the show, Zauner was a woman ready to dance through any feeling of lachrymose—prancing around stage in her red sailor-inspired dress. Her joy was infectious, and the entire crowd was completely ready to go with her on this affirmation of the triumphs of living. The set drew from all of her studio albums, as well as her great new song from the Pedro Pascal Dakota Johnson Materialists soundtrack, "My Baby (Got Nothing at All)," which, like the film it plays over the credits of, is about accepting your lover no matter how penniless they may be.
The encore was an enormous emotional dance summit, with three tracks from Jubilee, including her now-signature gong-banging in "Posing in Bondage," and her utterly rapturous hit, "Be Sweet." After the show, the audience was abuzz, everyone's lives better for experiencing it—knowing that even if tomorrow is rough, it won't always be that way.
