Consider This from NPR - The Best Song Japanese Breakfast Says She's Written Is For A Video Game

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

Michelle Zauner is best known as the frontwoman of indie rock band Japanese Breakfast and like most musicians, she's trying to tell a personal story through her music. But she's spent the last couple of years composing music that has nothing to do with her — for a video game soundtrack.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Michelle Zahner started playing video games at a pretty young age. I grew up playing video games since I was probably five years old. My dad bought me a Super Nintendo and the two of us really loved this RPG called Secret of Mana. And I feel like that was our major point of bonding. After school, she and her dad would play the game together in the family den. I think that was the first time that I realized that games could be a real art form. Zahner is better known as the frontwoman for the indie rock band Japanese Breakfast. And she says that in some ways, video games were a major part of her exposure to music. My parents weren't big music fans. I didn't grow up with that much music in the house.

And so I think the music that was very formative for me were these video game soundtracks and anime soundtracks that I grew up listening to as a kid. And I think a lot of that kind of sound made its way into my music in one way or another. Soundtracks from games like Chrono Cross. Or Final Fantasy. The type of music Zahner is used to writing has a hook and a chorus. It's music you can sing along to. I want to be a man. I want to be a savage. But over the last few years, she's been working on composing music that's very different from that for a video game. I really love the idea of pushing myself as a composer and a producer to take on something like this on my own.

Sable is the first video game Zahner has composed music for. It follows a young hero traveling across a desert planet to return to her family of nomads. It's a young person who's kind of on this precipice of adulthood that's pushed in maybe slightly before they're ready and has to figure it out on the way. The whole point of the game is just kind of figuring out where you belong and what you want to do. Consider this.

Most artists are trying to tell a personal story through their music, but for a video game soundtrack, that story, it's about a fictional character's journey. It was the first time I was writing a song that had nothing to do with me. Coming up, we'll hear from Zahner about how her work on Sable led to her writing, as she says, maybe the most beautiful song she's ever made. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Friday, October 1st. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies.

Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Over the last year, Michelle Zahner of Japanese Breakfast has been busy. She's released a new studio album called Jubilee. And she's also published her first memoir titled Crying in H Mart. It's an exploration of grief, food, and identity. Zahner grew up with a white American father and a Korean mother. And when her mother died of cancer in 2014, Zahner would have these moments just standing frozen in the aisles of the Korean grocery store chain H-Mart. Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, am I even Korean anymore? If there's no one left to call and ask, which brand of seaweed we used to buy. After releasing two big projects this year, Zahner released another, the soundtrack she composed for the video game Sable, which just dropped last week. That project took her four

years. A game takes many years to come together and you have to walk in step with the developers in a way that putting together an album is something that you kind of do as a self-contained thing. This isn't technically the first video game Zahner has worked on. Japanese Breakquest is a short browser to Zahner. The developers of Sable wanted to bring on a composer that was separate from the game world, but also wanted someone that had a passion for games. Her challenge was to create a soundtrack that people would never get tired of hearing during hours of gameplay. Music that would connect them to the main character's journey.

It was really important for me to convey a sense of like childlike wonder. I had to write a song that was very broad and very universal that could be interpreted in many different ways. And so I actually was listening to a lot of like Alan Menken's Disney themes and a lot of Studio Ghibli soundtracks to just see like how vague you could be in lyrically like to convey a feeling I just wanted to capture the feeling of just being a young girl on her own in the world and this feeling of wonderment and and uh that exciting quality of not knowing what's going to happen and learning how to trust yourself and your intuition. Zahner told the story of how this whole soundtrack came together. At the time, there was only a couple of animated GIFs of the artwork.

And even just from seeing those, I was pretty much in right away. The creative design is largely inspired by Studio Ghibli and Mobius and Tintin so the art style is really astounding. Gregorius Kithriotis, who is the creative director, comes from an architecture background, so a lot of the buildings are very intricate and interesting to explore. The basic premise of Sable is that you are a young girl who lives on a desert planet and has this sort of coming-of-age ceremony where you have to go out and explore this world and leave your village that you've grown up in.

Come into me Show us the way I'm caught between The wind and parts of the unknown So we knew really early on that we wanted to have this moment where a track with vocals and lyrics came in at this peak moment of the game, which is when you leave your home village and exit what you think to be, you know, a big part of the world and realize

that the world is much era where you explore these kind of ancient ships and it feels like more metallic little bit more ancient and organic. I used a lot of voice and vocal pads and woodwinds. I was listening to a lot of Ichiko Ayobe at the time, and she has these really beautiful, quiet, classical guitar albums. That sound is so homey to me, so I knew I wanted all of the villages has the greatest, like, library of the Yola Tango beats. Better Than Mask is one of my favorite songs on the soundtrack and I think is maybe the most beautiful song I've ever written. It's a really special song for me because it's the first song that I have composed the string arrangement for in its entirety.

I've always felt like I had to excavate personal trauma in order to make music that was compelling. And I think that with songs like Glider and especially Better Than Mask, it made me realize that I could compose music that was really moving without having to tap into that. But if you're bald and trying to find... That was musician Michelle Zahner of Japanese Breakfast,

who created the soundtrack for the new video game Sable. She spoke with NPR's Vincent Acabino. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.