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Michelle Zauner gets a little in her booking in her book in the living room, then she found the work you were looking for. “Orlando Innamorato” by Matteo Maria Boiardo. A tattered paperback, almost 600 pages thick. No novel. No non -fiction book. But a poem. An incredibly long poem. Written at the end of the 15th century in Italy, by a poet that had in mind, the very great love story. With knights that fight virtuously. For the country. To a woman’s heart. With Orlando as a noble hero who embodies the good. And the irrepressible will to love. “What romantic!” Says Michelle Zauner. If only the last pages weren’t there. “This epic poem suddenly breaks off.” Not because Boiardo died or nothing would have come to mind. The reason for this was profane: “The French had occupied Italy, there was war. And it was no longer undisturbed.” The poet’s last words: “While I sing, god of Savior, I see Italy in flames and fire wrapped.” And that’s it.
The melancholy and the sad
Zauner loves this story. The claim of the poem, but even more the circumstances under which it was created. So she made the noble Orlando one of her song. It is called “Orlando in Love”, is the first single of the new album of her band Japanese Breakfast and shipped him to the west coast of the USA, where Orlando takes a break in a Winnebago residential home. To soon be lured into the sea by a siren and drown there. What remains in Winnebago are the verses he had written. Dedicated to melancholic brunettes and sad women. And so also means the album: for melancholy Brunettes (and sad women).
She took over the title from a short story of the US author John Cheever, published in 1973 in the book “The World of Apple”, with references to the gigantic poem from Italy of the Renaissance: “Cheever tells the short story of a man who lives in an unfortunate marriage. And who lists all the types of women in his frustration with great gestures. Melancholy brunettes and sad things.
Jubilee: The breakthrough
Zauner has developed unerringly into a universal artist in recent years. After two very good and successful records with Japanese Breakfast in indie circles, the jubilee brought the breakthrough in 2021. Very high upstairs placed in many leaderboard, a place in the Billboard charts, a grammy nomination. In the previous years, Zauner had also shown herself as a shiny essayist. She published her biographically shaped texts in magazines such as the “New Yorker” or “Harper’s Bazaar”. Most of the relationship with her mother, a woman moved from South Korea to the USA, who integrated herself in a very idiosyncratic way in her new home. The marriage to Zauner’s father was unhappy; The fact that the man has a friend of his daughter today was also the subject of a text. However, most essays act from the time from 2014 when Zauner’s mother suffered pancreatic cancer. The daughter spent a lot of time with her mother, cooking Korean dishes for her-which led to the fact that she regularly visited the Asia supermarket around the corner. To suddenly break out in tears. What gave the book that gathered these essays: “Crying in H Mart”. The rights of pressure were auctioned, so great was the interest. In 2021 the book was on Barack Obama’s list of his favorite books. Planning for a film is currently underway. Zauner writes the script and is responsible for the soundtrack. And certainly she will have a say in the cinematic implementation, because she also knows about it: usually she is directed by the videos of the singles of Japanese Breakfast.
The magic mountain
So it was absolutely great in the end. Then why this sadness? “Because it is my basic state,” she says. Sure, fantastic things have happened in recent years. “But all of this helps you little if you think between these highlights about the transience of your life. And then you get the message that important people have seriously ill or even died.” What she noticed during this period of brooding: how different the circumstances are in which you transfer this melancholy in prospice texts, and on the other hand. “If I want to write in a text about a dreary day, I read to my favorite authors like Richard Ford, how they did it. I have to be full of opportunities to write myself. I work on an album, I ask for an album after an absolute silence. Because my music can only be created in a pure, empty space. A place that is as far as possible from everything that can be detached.”
What we are in Davos, in the International Sanatorium Berghof, where the Hamburg Hans Castorp actually only wants to visit his cousin for three weeks, but then stay up there for seven years. On the “Magic Mountain”. On the “Magic Mountain”, as the book is called in English. And as Zauner named the last song of the album. A song about the dreams of what will come once the fever is gone. This fever only enables dreams. “I read the ‘Magic Mountain’ in Switzerland for the first time in 2023 when we were on tour, and I actually got sick that day. No wonder that Zauner could be drawn into the book. “I developed a crush for Hans Castorp. He is a chic, small boy. Confident smoker. May only be certain types of alcohol. Is intellectually curious but easy to influence. And very romantic.” What is romance? “If the everyday life is raised to something spectacular.”
Fog & sea
Zauner thinks that the Europeans and especially the Germans are good at it. For example, she also developed a soft spot for Caspar David Friedrich, the painting star of romanticism, whose characters often turn his back on the viewer, as well as the most famous of them, “the hiker over the fog sea”. Zauner once again refers to her song “Orlando in Love”: “This is how I imagine my Orlando before he is pulled out of fog from the siren into this sea. As a foolish shape that simply accepts that nothing could happen if she follows the call of the siren.” The fog, the sea – they are always there. It is the man who raises nature spectacularly when he perishes it. Quite a lot of male stories on this record, right? “Yes, but written by a woman.” And anyway, it also shows with Thomas Mann that the romance of the man knows this one profane limit. In the book, the First World War calls after the apparently eternal time in the sanatorium. Suddenly have and overthrown. Shortly thereafter, Castorp is a healing hail as an army. His fate uncertain. The survival is unlikely. “Bury Me Beside You In The Shadow of My Mountain,” Zauner says in her song. “Grab me next to you in the shadow of my mountain.”