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Michelle Zauner is in the middle of reading one of my stories when I meet her backstage at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. She’s there for the first of two sold-out shows, but she immediately starts asking about me. What do I like to write about? What do I want to write about but haven’t tried? After sound check, what would I like to eat? Would Korean food work?

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The 29-year-old frontwoman of the deceptively upbeat audio/visual/performance tour de force Japanese Breakfast zeroes in on a nearby spot: Lucky Pig, a joint a block away, where the lighting is disorientingly split between incandescent on one side and fluorescent on the other. Dressed in all-black basics and a pair of slides my grandmother might’ve worn in her lifetime, Michelle chats with the staff in Korean and English. The restaurant is so new that it doesn’t have its liquor license yet, so the wait staff directs us to the nearest corner store for alcohol.

Michelle pops out to acquire a large can of Sapporo, from which she pours my glass first. She’s been antsy since an incident with a sound guy during sound check, and surrounded by other diners’ conversations and dizzyingly fragrant food, she gets into it.

“I have so many friends in this industry, so many women who play music, who are gonna play these same rooms and work with these same kinds of people. They need to know who is not good. I know it’ll ruin their experience just as much as it ruins mine.” She chatters, in the half-laughing throwaway manner of someone who’s dealt with much worse but knows she shouldn’t be used to it, “I’m so sick of people making me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing when I have done this pretty much every other day for two and a half years.”

