1) The biggest takeaway from a memoir is that you have to play fair. Within the first draft, I was writing very angrily because I had a lot of resentment and a lot to process. Revision is where a lot of learning happens and a lot of forgiveness happens.
2) The most Korean thing you can eat that's so easy is Shin Ramyun with an egg cracked into it and kimchi on the side. I feel like every Korean person eats that at nighttime or for a snack.
3) I read Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson and Jhumpa Lahiri and Richard Ford, John Updike, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov - all of whom I really fell in love with.
4) But for a song like 'Paprika,' I typically feel like I need to experience anguish a lot of the time to feel like I've put in enough hard work.
5) I've been working with my stylist for a long time, Cece Liu. We've gone from buying and returning clothing to this point where maybe finally a designer will dress me without me having to buy and return it.
6) I've never felt so physically emotionally and mentally drained as I have on our shoots.
7) There's this thing where Asian parents force you to play an instrument at an early age, but god forbid you to like it and want to pursue it professionally! But, as a kid, I never did choir and didn't sing.
8) Growing up, stereotypes were being put about me as an Asian person that I had no control over, and that made me extremely uncomfortable.
9) I don't really listen to podcasts - I like one podcast and it's called Song Exploder.
10) My mom would frequently tell me to save my tears for when my mother died.
11) My dad and I actually don't speak anymore. It's still something that I'm trying to figure out and I definitely don't have all of the answers to it.
12) I love kitchenware. I'm very frugal and I don't buy a lot of things, but I'm frivolous when it comes to buying groceries and kitchenware.
13) I was a late bloomer when it came to reading. My parents didn't really read. Neither one of my parents went to college. I did not grow up with any literature in the house at all.
14) I only wanted to play the guitar so I could write music. As soon as I learned my first three chords I wrote my first song. It was just a tool to get me to be able to do the thing that I wanted to do.
15) I'd always struggled with being a very depressed and anxious person in high school. If I had let that kind of dark moment consume me, I wouldn't be able to climb out of it. So I became a bit of a shark.
16) I think something I explore a little bit in my music is how there's this majestic, natural beauty in the Pacific Northwest, but also this kind of underlying eeriness.
17) I'm a very impatient person. I like things to be done. So I complete a lot of projects, but it helps to partner or collaborate with someone who's the opposite because they can tell me when to slow down.
18) I really love MFK Fisher's food writing, and obviously, Anthony Bourdain's food writing is exceptional, in particular, 'A Cook's Tour'. I really love the short story that he writes about revisiting the coastal town in France of his childhood and the memories that he has of his father.
19) One thing that's nice about writing a book about food is - unless it's from a specific place - you can revisit things easily by preparing the dish. The sensory detail that comes from interacting with that is something that can be recreated pretty easily.
20) Initially it was so important for me to be credited as a producer, play all these instruments, and be the sole writer on everything. I think especially as a woman, you want to be taken seriously as a musician, as a producer.
21) When I started doing press after college, I never got asked about my racial identity; I was asked more about being a girl in music.
22) I have naturally always been a grossly oversharing type of person.
23) My relationship with music is such an essential part of who I am and was a big part of my relationship with my mom.
24) I've been lucky to come up when there's such a huge explosion of women, especially Asian women, in music.
25) I never really wanted to be a journalist, honestly. I always wanted to be a writer, and I thought the only way to apply that interest was with journalism - when you're young and you want to be a writer, it seems like the most practical thing to do with those types of ambitions.
26) There are so many different things that lend themselves to what makes a song magical, that go beyond just the lyrics or the composition. But arrangement and production and performance have such huge stakes in what makes that sort of lightning-in-a-bottle moment.
27) I can't enjoy the rush of how magical of an experience it is to have people listen to you, relate to you, and have this type of attention and understanding.
28) When you're looking back at your ancestral history or the cultural context of your identity, it's natural to search for that in the food.
29) One thing that was pretty eye-opening to me was that red pepper came from the New World in the 15th or 16th century. So these things that we think of as inherently Korean actually have an even longer history than that.
30) I never thought I would be able to play in Seoul, the city where my mother was raised and I was born, and I was able to perform for my aunt.
31) Once death was really close to me, I suddenly became very fearful of it. I think that lit a fire in me like, 'What do you have to say before it happens?'
32) Soft Sounds' was about disassociating to preserve my mental health.
33) I was always being told to calm down, to chill out, to slow down. I was a bad toddler, I was a bad child, I was a bad teenager.
34) I tried to be a musician for seven years and I'd given it my all, but no one was really interested or it wasn't enough.
35) Being a caretaker for someone whose death was really, really hard at 25.
36) I felt like I could never write nonfiction because I would have to spend so many pages explaining my ethnic background, and that wasn't really the story that I ever was interested in telling.
37) Food in general is really important for any diaspora, and it's really important for Korean people. This was a connection my mom and I could always have together that made her feel like I was more hers.
38) I think growing up, I didn't ever attempt to define my Koreanness. It was just this intrinsic part of me.
39) When I'm in America, everyone thinks of me as an Asian girl. When I go to Korea, everyone thinks of me as an American.
40) I grew up playing video games since I was probably five years old.
41) My records have a lot of collaborators on them, and when you're writing a book, it's a very insular process that's very confusing and dark. It's a lot of writing and rewriting in a way that I don't do so much when I'm writing songs.
42) If you wrote a crummy line or maybe didn't sing to the best of your ability, there are layers of 10 different instruments all working to convey something. In writing prose for the memoir, if it's not working, it's just not working. It's harder to figure out how to fix it.
43) When my mom was sick and in the hospital, I did for the first time feel really bad that a lot of men aren't taught how to take care of other people very well. It's not as important of a skill for them as other things, in the same way, that I really resent not being given a toolbox when I was younger.
44) My main memory of 'Soft Sounds' was that I was so convinced that 'Psychopomp' was this fluke - I had this real pressure of avoiding the sophomore slump.
45) One thing that I've always tried to do is create lifts - the moment that you have a rush of feelings. That's always something that I'm trying to communicate in music, particularly the style of music that I write for Japanese Breakfast: I'm always trying to build things up into each other.
46) Sometimes I can really agonize over a creative project and forget that it's essentially professional play, you know?
47) Even as a teenager, when I made mix CDs for people, it all had this sort of track flow: I like to start off very in-your-face, and kind of chill out towards the end and have this almost, like, denouement.
48) I just have to live my life knowing that there could be a good chance that I might die in middle age.
49) I feel like there are several indie artists... as they grow, it makes the most sense for them to pivot to pop, to become bigger artists. And I feel like that's when people get really bad, you know? I didn't want to fall into that pitfall.
50) I never made kimchi before. I talk about my first time making it in the book, and I'm not a big baker, but I imagine it's like a similar kind of feeling for a lot of people who are bakers where it's just something that takes time. There's so much space to be reflective and meditative.
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