Japanese Breakfast with special guest SASAMI

Presented by ASU 365 Community Union.
 

From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.

Jubilee is an album about processing life and love in the quest for happiness, and how that process sometimes requires us to step outside of ourselves. “Savage Good Boy” isn’t the only time Zauner takes on a persona; On the cavernous masterpiece “Posing In Bondage,” she imagines a woman left behind in the confines of an empty house, traversing the blurred lines between domesticity and dominance as she sings to an absent lover. Meanwhile, “Kokomo, IN” was written from the perspective of a small- town Indiana boy, forced to say goodbye to a girlfriend who’s shipping off to study abroad. But throughout Jubilee, Zauner is hardly fictionalizing her lyrics, instead pouring her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution—these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it.

Photo credit: Peter Ash Lee

 

SASAMI is the solo project of composer and songwriter Sasami Ashworth, currently based and making music in Los Angeles SASAMI spent her early years studying classical French horn, and after graduating from the Eastman School of Music in 2012, she scored and made orchestral arrangements for films, commercials and studio albums. She also spent many years as a music teacher before touring full-time—first with Cherry Glazerr, then as SASAMI, after releasing her self-titled, widely critically acclaimed debut solo album in 2019 on Domino. Whether she has strings, horns, or a rock band in her employ, SASAMI is a modern composer who tackles an emotional spectrum as broad as her arrangement choices and creates a dynamic show with her musically dramatic offerings. Hushed vocals, guitar wails, violent yelps and tender harmonies can all be expected at a SASAMI show. Her new single "Sorry Entertainer" is a heavy metal rendition of a Daniel Johnston deep-cut, acting as a peek into the sonic world to come, on her highly anticipated, yet-to-be-announced second album.