Japanese Breakfast - Paprika

"How's it feel to stand at the height of your powers? To captivate every heart. Projecting your visions to strangers who feel, who listen and linger on every word. Oh, it's a rush."

Album: Jubilee [3rd album]
Genre: Chamber Pop, Dream Pop
Album Release: June 4th 2021
Single Release: September 27th 2021 [4th single]
Length: 3.40
Producer: Japanese Breakfast
Vocalist: Michelle Zauner [age 32]
Label: Dead Oceans

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Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: Over 18 million
YouTube Music: Over 1.5 million

Credits

Strings, brass, keyboards, drums and the all important gong.

Details

• Inspired by the 2006 anime Paprika, which was also an inspiration for the film Inception (2010). In Paprika, a device, which allows psychiatrists to enter their patients minds, is stolen. 
  
• Produced on Pro Tools.
  
  
• "I was playing around with a lot of these Spitfire Albion orchestra plugins, and I had come up with this marching band thing that built up into this huge crash in the chorus. I basically brought it to Craig and was just like, "How do we make this real?"" (Michelle Zauner talking to NPR)
  


• "The challenging part for that song was getting the feel. I wasn't part of high school drumlines, and I don't have the muscle memory or really solid snare drum chops that a lot of drummers have, so it definitely took some time to replicate those and maintain that momentum that a marching band would have. But afterwards, it was a lot of fun to just put up every drum we had in the studio, and get all the different tom tones and the cymbal crashes and the big splash cymbals and everything. That part lives up to the name Jubilee. I think it's tough not to dance while you're playing those." (Craig Hendrix talking to NPR)


• This was a very more is more kind of track, and a big challenge of it was finding the right pocket for everything. We maxed out our Pro Tools session because we had strings, brass, all these keyboards and all these drums. It's a very overused word in recording, but I feel like there is always this desire to make something feel really warm and inviting. So much of what I think about this record, of it being about joy and having this warmer color palette, also extends to the sonics of it. That's what we were trying to do on this song, too: find everything, and be able to create dynamics, even when there's a ton of stuff going on. (Michelle Zauner)
  

Artwork