Michelle Zauner

“I grew up playing video games, since I was probably five years old.”

“There are so many different things that lend themselves to what makes a song magical, that go beyond just the lyrics or the composition. But arrangement and production and performance have such huge stakes in what makes that sort of lightning-in-a-bottle moment.”

“With Jubilee I had a natural interest to write about something on the opposite end of human experience - a real celebration of release and joy, which is in some ways an unexpected theme for the indie rock genre in general.”

“Soft Sounds' was really hard for me. I was petrified of the 'sophomore slump' so I created an environment to best combat that self-doubt and feelings that my first album was a real fluke.”

“One thing that I've always tried to do is create lifts - the moment that you have a rush of feelings. That's always something that I'm trying to communicate in music, and particularly the style of music that I write for Japanese Breakfast: I'm always trying to build things up into each other.”

“I'm obviously a poptimist. I especially like pop music that isn't formulaic and has depth to it.”

“The biggest takeaway from a memoir is that you have to play fair. Within the first draft, I was writing very angrily because I had a lot of resentment and a lot to process. Through revision is where a lot of learning happened and a lot of forgiveness happened.”

“One of my more recent favorite memories is of traveling to Jeonju with my aunt and uncle. After my mother passed away, my aunt and I became a lot closer, and I've really grown to cherish the relationship we formed together as adults.”

“I was a late bloomer when it came to reading. My parents didn't really read. Neither one of my parents went to college. I did not grow up with any literature in the house at all.”

“I really love MFK Fisher's food writing, and obviously Anthony Bourdain's food writing is exceptional, in particular 'A Cook's Tour'. I really love the short story that he writes about revisiting the coastal town in France of his childhood and the memories that he has of his father.”

“I've been working with my stylist for a long time, Cece Liu. We've gone from buying and returning clothing, to this point where maybe finally a designer will dress me without me having to buy and return it.”

“I love Pico Iyer's 'A Beginner's Guide to Japan', which again is not about Korea, but so full of clever observations from the point of view of a foreigner in a new city, it's just delightful.”

“I read Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson and Jhumpa Lahiri and Richard Ford, John Updike, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov - all of whom I really fell in love with.”

“I think that 'Psychopomp' is very much a Eugene, Oregon record.”

“I've always felt like I needed to experience some type of anguish in order to feel productive as an artist.”

“I never made kimchi before. I talk about my first time making it in the book, and I'm not a big baker, but I imagine it's like a similar kind of feeling for a lot of people who are bakers where it's just something that takes time. There's so much space to be reflective and meditative.”

“I never really wanted to be a journalist, honestly. I always wanted to be a writer, and I thought the only way to apply that interest was with journalism - when you're young and you want to be a writer, it seems like the most practical thing to do with those types of ambitions.”

“My favorite thing that I'm learning, in particular, is that the type of love between an immigrant parent and their child growing up in America is a particular nuanced type of love.”

“Even as a teenager, when I made mix CDs for people, it all had this sort of track flow: I like to start off very in-your-face, and kind of chill out towards the end and have this almost, like, denouement.”

“I only wanted to play the guitar so I could write music. As soon as I learned my first three chords I wrote my first song. It was just a tool to get me to be able to do the thing that I wanted to do.”