Watch Japanese Breakfast Perform “Be Sweet” and “Jimmy Fallon Big!” on “Jimmy Fallon”

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Watch Japanese Breakfast Perform “Be Sweet” and “Jimmy Fallon Big!” on “Jimmy Fallon”

Jubilee Due Out June 4 on Dead Oceans

Mar 16, 2021 By Mark Redfern

Japanese Breakfast (Michelle Zauner) is releasing a new album, Jubilee, on June 4 via Dead Oceans. Last night she was the musical guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, in which she performed the album’s lead single “Be Sweet.” Zauner and her band also performed “Jimmy Fallon Big!” as a web-exclusive. That song was from her last album, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, and was inspired by the bass player in her former band Little Big League, who quit that band to join a new one he said would be “Jimmy Fallon big.” He eventually rejoined Zauner in Japanese Breakfast, who is now big enough to play Jimmy Fallon. Watch both performances below, as well as a video of Fallon explaining the origins of the song.

“Be Sweet” made it to #1 on our Songs of the Week list. Japanese Breakfast performed the song from National Sawdust in Brooklyn and did so with the aid of an alien bartender.

Zauner had this to say about “Be Sweet” in a previous press release: “After spending the last five years writing about grief, I wanted our follow up to be about joy. For me, a third record should feel bombastic and so I wanted to pull out all the stops for this one. I wrote ‘Be Sweet’ with Jack Tatum from Wild Nothing a few years ago. I’ve been holding onto it for so long and am so excited to finally put it out there.”

She added, regarding her new album: “I’ve never wanted to rest on any laurels. I wanted to push it as far as it could go, inviting more people in and pushing myself as a composer, a producer, an arranger.”

Zauner’s most recent album, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, came out in July 2017 on Dead Oceans and was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2017. Her upcoming memoir, Crying In H Mart, will be out April 20 on Knopf.

Last year, Zauner surprise released an EP with Ryan Galloway of Crying titled pop songs 2020. It featured the song “Black Light,” which was one of our Songs of the Week.

Read our 2017 interview with Japanese Breakfast on Soft Sounds From Another Planet.