Words by Rhian Daly

“I feel like I won the lottery,” Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner laughs down the phone from Chicago. The acclaimed indie-rock musician is back on the road with her main project after a pandemic-enforced pause on live music, but live shows aren’t the only thing she’s finally able to share with the world this week. After around four years of behind-the-scenes work, Zauner’s soundtrack for the new Shedworks open-world video game Sable has been released. “I’ve had so many musicians be like, ‘How do I do this?’” she says of the project. 

Although Sable marks Zauner’s first foray into the world of video game soundtracks, this isn’t the first time she’s merged her music with games. An avid gamer herself, on her second Japanese Breakfast album, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, she created a mini RPG game alongside Elaine Fath, ingeniously titled Japanese Breakquest. It was partially down to that online adventure that allowed the musician to be involved in Sable. 

“I think it was important to [the developers] to find a composer that was outside of the game world – but had an appreciation of games – to bring something new,” Zauner explains. “It felt like a really good fit, and as soon as I saw the gifs [of the game], I was so enchanted by them, like everyone else.”

Her involvement began when the game – which has users play as Sable, a young girl on a coming-of-age journey, figuring out who she is through its different realms and scenarios – was still in its early stages. “Daniel [Fineberg, developer] and Greg [Kythreotis, creative director] had to create an entire world, and it was just about trying to keep in step with them,” she says. Initially, all she had to reference while crafting her compositions were “a long Word document and a few gifs”. Building the soundtrack became almost like a puzzle – as she got more information and videos of the gameplay itself, she often realised songs she’d written for one area didn’t quite fit but might work in one of the other spaces in the game. 

“If you read a description of what a glow worm cave might look like, it feels very different when you see a video and then again when you get to play inside a build of that,” Zauner explains. In its final form, the soundtrack’s song ‘Glow Worm Cave’ does evoke the feeling of being in a gloomy cavern, lit up only by a soft glow. Its synth drones are luminescent, flickering underneath shadowy, atmospheric motifs. 

Sable encompasses different worlds or biomes, from ancient ruins to “atomic ships” and cosy camps, and Zauner draws from a broad palette of instruments to make each sound distinctive. The ruins are brought to life by woodwinds, while industrial samples and synths lend the ship space to a cooler air. The camp, meanwhile, is a welcoming area soundtracked by warm, rich guitar and piano. 

“I liked the idea of certain instruments representing different directional points of the game,” she says. “So, for example, if you go north-west, those biomes start to incorporate this crystal-sounding piano, or if you go south, you get some more percussive elements.” 

As you journey through the game, day turns to night, and so Zauner’s soundtrack changes mood too. There are several day-night variations on the accompanying OST, the brighter originals of the songs becoming slower and stiller. “The main things I took into consideration there were slowing down the BPM for the nighttime and making the instrumentation sparser,” she confirms. “It was largely about making it sleepier.” 

One part of the soundtrack that definitely isn’t sleepy is ‘Cartographer’s Theme’, which marches on a staccato melody that makes you feel as if you are a tiny, digital version of yourself lurching through a virtual world on a mission. Zauner laughs when it’s brought up: “It’s so weird, it’s a kind of annoying theme.” Its “goofy” sound, as she describes it, was inspired by the sound design around the game’s cartographer characters, as well as their masks. “I felt like it needed a familiar theme,” she explains. “As you climb up to these cartographers, the music comes closer and closer. It reminded me of the birds in Breath Of The Wild – you can hear that accordion from a distance, and you know what’s coming.” 

She might have primarily made the Sable soundtrack to soundtrack Fineberg and Kythreotis’ gameplay, but it also stands on its own as an album of sublime ambient music. Making it work as a standalone record was always at the back of its creator’s mind as she built it. “I was very conscious of that,” she says. “I was listening to so much ambient music, especially because I get distracted so easily. I can’t do anything while listening to music usually because I always focus on what’s happening in it.” 

She sees a growth in demand for ambient music right now because “there’s so much content in the world”. “I feel like younger people are finding reprieve in ambient music – we’re so engaged all the time that ambient music is maybe becoming more of a soothing thing or something to turn to in this time of so much stimulus,” she reasons. “It was really important to me to have something tranquil and soothing that someone could listen to and enjoy as a standalone piece.” 

Making the record, though, presented different challenges to her work as Japanese Breakfast. Only three songs on the soundtrack have lyrics, emphasising the instruments she was choosing and requiring the melodies and chords to tell the story in place of words. Sable’s open-world format also means players will likely hear the songs repetitively, so they need not get grating after many plays, as some pop songs do. 

“Japanese Breakfast is such a pop project, and I’ve always felt my strength as a musician was coming up with pop hooks and earworms,” Zauner says. “Those are something to avoid in this kind of game, writing the soundtrack was definitely a big undoing of that knowledge.” Instead, she had to learn how to expand her songs into “sprawling, sparse loops”. “It was a challenge, but it was also really fun. It’s just a very different part of your brain that you’re working with.” 

Meanwhile, the three tracks that feature vocals and lyrics needed Zauner to remove herself from her own world and write from the perspective of the game’s titular character – another challenge for someone who acknowledges that she often writes in “hyper-specific details and very vulnerable oversharing of my life”. But working on the Sable soundtrack showed her that she is capable of “creating a compelling composition without mining my own personal trauma”. I was really excited to discover I can write compelling music, both lyrically and compositionally, without leaning on that,” she explains. “That really unlocked something for me.” 

It’s something that Japanese Breakfast fans should expect to hear more of in her main project. On her third album Jubilee, released in June, she began to write more about other people and different perspectives and has plans only to increase that in the future. “Especially as I get older and my life becomes a little more boring and without drama, I have to imagine those moments a bit more now,” she laughs. 

Although Zauner has no more soundtracks lined up at the moment, they are also something she’d like to become more involved in in the future. She points to two franchises that she turned to for inspiration while working on Sable as her dream project. “I would love to sing on or write a Studio Ghibli song, or a Final Fantasy song,” she says. “Something iconic!”