Ask an Insider: Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner on Her Tour Essentials and Fender’s New Meteora Electric Guitar

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Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission.From sound engineers and screenwriters to celebrity makeup artists and stylists, Variety’s new series “Ask an Insider” will ask top professionals within the entertainment industry to share their must-have essentials, for work… and for play.

In this installment, Michelle Zauner, the lead singer and songwriter behind the indie rock band Japanese Breakfast, shares her love for the Fender electric guitars she plays on stage, as well as her other tour essentials.Japanese Breakfast’s third studio album “Jubilee,” as the name would suggest, is about joy — a thematic departure from Michelle Zauner’s distinctly somber, melancholic music that lends itself to an entirely new sonic landscape.

The tone of the new album, which came out last June, may have come as a surprise to longtime fans accustomed to the gloomy chords of 2016’s “Pyschopomp” and 2017’s “Soft Sounds from Another Planet,” both deeply informed by Zauner’s grief following her mother’s death in 2014.

But after releasing “Crying in H Mart,” a moving memoir that sees Zauner revisit this same grief in a different medium, it makes sense that she saw her next album as an opportunity to finally start anew, to break free from these emotional confines to start a fresh chapter.“Paprika,” the album’s opening track, serves as the perfect reintroduction to Japanese Breakfast’s new sound, packed with sustained synthesizers and steady drumming that evoke a carnival-like feeling that threads its way through the entire album, all the way to a minutes-long guitar solo in “Posing for Cars.”“It’s like a plate of color on the palette,” Zauner.