Japanese Breakfast – Everybody Wants to Love You (Music Video)

by Steven Spoerl

japanese breakfast

Over the course of the first three days of this week music videos from Forth Wanderers, Infinity Crush, Amy O, Communist Daughter, Emma Ruth Rundle, The Coathangers, Dead Leaf Echo, July Talk, Geowulf, Pixx, MV & EE, and Vallens all emerged (and were well worth watching). As good as all of those titles wound up being, the attention here mostly falls to another gorgeous collaboration between the House of Nod production team and Japanese Breakfast.

Director and cinematographer Adam Kolodny is once again at the helm, controlling the action with a deftness that plays up the narrative’s lyrical quality. Michelle Zauner, who started Japanese Breakfast as an outlet for more personal work, joins Kolodny as a co-director. The results of their creative partnership are spellbinding. The emotional resonance of “Everybody Wants to Love You” goes far past the formidable sense of style and hinges on one heartbreaking detail: throughout the entire clip, Zauner’s wearing her mother’s wedding dress, tying together two important elements of the devastating final section of her piece for this site’s A Year’s Worth of Memories series.

Even with that shattering detail, “Everybody Wants to Love You” is imbued with a liveliness that makes it endlessly compelling. Littered with references to Eastern cinema, the clips also becomes a rapidly-shifting playground of influences that are worn proudly on the sleeve. Zauner’s central performance is suffused with the kind of effortless magnetism that continues to draw people to the Japanese Breakfast project.

As is always the case with House of Nod, everything is gorgeously lensed and treated with a sense of careful consideration. Every element of “Everybody Wants to Love You” ties together with the kind of precision that makes even the strongest visual flourishes feel like they’re part of an incredibly comprehensive whole. A host of familiar faces and locations enliven the proceedings even further, allotting “Everybody Wants to Love You” a communal, celebratory atmosphere.

\In pairing one of the year’s best songs with exhilarating filmmaking, “Everybody Wants to Love You” is precisely the kind of clip that artists and directors should be looking to for cues years down the line. Dive in and get lost in its magic.

Watch “Everybody Wants to Love You” below and pick up Psychopomp here.