“I heard The Fillmore is 100 years old,” said Michelle Zauner, lead singer of Japanese Breakfast, her eyes flicking towards the ornate ceiling and knight statues flanking the stage. “I also heard it was haunted.” The crowd leaned in, the air seemed to flicker. Suddenly, the lights flashed red. A scatter of comedic noises one would expect in a 1950s Disney Halloween special, honks, bonks, and a booming yell from Zauner, improvised, possessed, maybe both, before melting into “Honey Water.”
It’s this balance, melodrama and melody, ghost stories and gorgeous chords that defines Japanese Breakfast’s performance on the latest stop of the Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) tour. It felt less like a concert than a reckoning of grief, joy and the emotional aftershocks of art itself.
Opening act Ginger Root, the moniker of multi-instrumentalist Cameron Lew, arrives with something akin to a VHS era funk machine. The project leans retro, with Lew singing into an old landline handle—equal parts sincere and self-aware. In the first minute, screens to each side of the stage displayed a message: “We’ll be done in 40 minutes.” Also using the screens to show the Ginger Root Cinematic Universe (as he called it) visuals were reminiscent of 80s commercials and lo-fi public access. Lew’s set plays like a transmission from another (groovier) timeline.
The set was brisk, clean and brimming with charm. Songs like “Better Than Monday” and “Only You” didn’t just glide, they pulsed with warmth and humor. Lew moved between instruments effortlessly, his visual gags and energy rivaling any rock show. The audience, charmed from the start, responded with laughter, cheers, and unshakable attention. As the crowd exited, one fan looked back at Ginger Root and called him a “show-off” with unmistakable admiration.
By 9:15 p.m., Zauner and her band emerged to a soft light and an ovation that felt joyful and reverent. The stage was drenched in an orangish color with a backdrop reminiscent of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” a fitting allusion to the performance and album that felt like a rebirth of its own.
They opened with “Here Is Someone,” then slipped into “Orlando in Love.” Each song was another ripple in an emotional current that pulled the audience deeper, through longing, catharsis and joy.
Zauner, whose memoir “Crying in H Mart” carries the same sharp introspection she gave on stage, seemed fully in her element: graceful, commanding, impossibly human. Mid-set favorites “Be Sweet” and “Kokomo, IN” prompted dancing and singing, while “Magic Mountain” was introduced with a moment of tenderness. Zauner spoke tenderly of a close friend, an artist and mother, reflecting on the emotional toll of creation and caretaking.
And then there was the dancing. Zauner swayed, spun and stomped—sometimes with abandon, sometimes with the elegance of a woman alone in her bedroom, dancing just because she could. It was a kind of communion: music not just heard but felt, lived, released.
For the encore, Zauner admitted hesitation to play “Posing for Cars,” a slow burn marked by aching silences, but changed her mind after spotting fans dancing on the balcony and wearing paper crowns, and she sat at the edge of the shell, beginning the final song of their 2021 LP, Jubilee.
As the final trio, ”Paprika,” “Diving Woman,” and the devastating “Posing for Cars” rang out, it felt like we all had been given permission to feel something enormous and unnamed.
Japanese Breakfast didn’t just play a show. They summoned a space where emotions became sacred, beauty was loud and a haunted venue (though locals will note: it’s Detroit’s Masonic Temple, not The Fillmore that carries the haunted reputation) became, if only for a few hours, a home.
