One of the gifts of watching Michelle Zauner live is seeing someone who lives her truth in public, in performance, in lyric. She is openly bisexual, and though she doesn’t always make headlines for it, it flows through her songs and words.
Some of Michelle’s words that stick:
“I’m hella bi. Always have been always will be.”
“’Everybody Wants to Love You’ was written about my relationship with a woman.”
But she’s said more than that. In an interview with Them For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) she’s talked about androgyny, queer nightlife, and gendered expectations. She says she’s influenced by lived experience across encounter and loss, attraction and confusion—and always trying to steer that into art with clarity.
At The Pageant on October 6, during one of the gentler moments, Michelle spoke to the audience about feeling like identity and attraction are sometimes things you examine more quietly than you live them, that queerness isn’t always loud but also doesn’t need hiding. That something as simple as singing a love song to a woman matters. That being seen matters. (I wish I had her exact words from the stage—it felt sacred.)
Michelle Zauner. Photo credit: Thomas Blue
This show wasn’t just another stop—it felt like a reckoning.” Perhaps because it was that harvest moon, glowing full, a nightly reminder of cycles, growth, loss, renewal. “Japanese Breakfast” leveraged that vibe: slow build‑ups, songs of grief followed by eruption, interludes that let silence settle into the room before erupting again. A gong hit that sent reverberations through the audience; Michelle’s voice sometimes hushed, sometimes roaring; the band moving as if they were experiencing every lyric with us, not just performing it.
Fans posted afterward: “They were really on fire last night.” The setlist traversed from Psychopomp deep cuts to Jubilee highs to Brunettes new thresholds. No filler, every moment felt curated for communal catharsis.
Spellling. Photo by Thomas Blue
The evening opened with Chrystia Cabral (aka SPELLLING) unfurled textures of glimmering synth, unexpected shifts, and voice-transformations that blurred the lines between pop and incantation, warming the room before Michelle Zauner and her band rose to bathe it in emotional radiance. With her latest “Portrait of My Heart,” SPELLLING has been pushing toward higher energy while retaining her haunting identity: songs like “Alibi” and “Destiny Arrives” move with an urgency that felt alive in that dim theater, a perfect prelude to Japanese Breakfast’s own journey into melancholy, catharsis, and queer power.
