FEATURING 

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) by Japanese Breakfast, released by Dead Oceans in 2025. Listen / Buy direct 

• "Here is Someone"
• "Mega Circuit"
• "Picture Window"

TRANSCRIPT 

The best music, in my opinion, simply makes us listen, captivating our attention so fully that everything else falls away. So I guess it goes without saying that that's what this music does for me, unspooling with this lush, rococo exuberance that audibly shimmers in its brilliance. Sounds upon sounds upon sounds to just get lost in. Its cup runneth over, and I just want to drink it all in. There's something new and wondrous around every corner, to hold our focus and delight our senses – even these pitchy little flutes, with their unexpected pathos. This song is like a secret garden I've wandered into and now never wish to leave. 

And then there are these lines, that break my heart every time: 

Watching you from the yard 
Life is sad but here is someone 
Someone 
Someone 
Someone 
Someone 

There are many ways to hear those lines, but to my ear they recall that experience where we are suddenly jolted out of a depressive and anxious state of mind by the apprehension of a concrete individual before our eyes, in all their particular beauty and infinite possibility. Even if only for the briefest of moments, our attention becomes fixed on something outside our selves. And sometimes that's all we need. And sometimes that's what music does for us, too. So let's keep listening. 

Because this music will keep holding our attention, even as it changes in its sound and its feel, and even as it turns its own attention elsewhere. If that first song was showing us a way out of life's sadness, much of the rest of the album seems devoted to cataloguing its diverse and many causes: absent fathers, unfaithful partners, or, as in this song, "incel eunuchs". It's looking the enemy square in the eye. 

But here, too, the music shows us a way out of this ugliness, through the sheer jauntiness of its groove. It dazzles with a cornucopia of sounds: little rattles, big drums, a pulsating synth, and a tender accompaniment on guitar. It's enough to make you forget about everything wrong with boys these days. 

But that raises the question: Is this song offering deliverance, or distraction? And as if on cue, the singer delivers this chilling couplet: 

Well I better write my baby a shuffle good 
Or he's gonna make me suffer the way I should 

In this final turn, the song presents itself as written for one of those disturbed young men, as a means of pacifying the violence within. And although this might make it seem like some gross performance, a coerced pantomime of country western swagger, what I hear is a note of radical hope: that if anything is gonna reach these boys, if anything is gonna turn their attention away from the false gods they worship, it will be music, if we can just get them to listen. 

And now, a different kind of struggle: a song where the narrator is the one in need of saving, and where the cause of life's sadness is the enemy within, the singer's own mind, and in particular an anxious chittering of intrusive thoughts, permeating their experience and overtaking their consciousness, like this: 

Are you not afraid of every waking minute 
That your life could pass you by? 

Again, it sure doesn't sound like a song about obsessive compulsion, with its soft throb of slide guitar and pedal steel. And the chorus is weirdly affirming of these mental preoccupations, with its sweet refrain of "All of my ghosts are real". There is no denial in the lyrics, only acceptance. But in the music, I hear emancipation. 

It's yet another juxtaposition of sadness and salvation, with music appearing as the saving grace. And really, that's what this entire album is about: the push and pull between mental distraction and refocused attention, between the forces that plunge our minds into darkness and the moments that make us come up for air and see the light. 

The point is not to deny anyone's reality. Life is sad, your ghosts are real. The point is to show us that there are other realities out there too – that alongside all the death and violence and infidelity, there is beauty and joy and music. There's enough out there to save us. We just need to turn our mind towards it and let it in.