Songfacts®:

• Japanese Breakfast is the musical project of Michelle Zauner, a Philadelphia-based one-woman band born in Seoul, South Korea. "Be Sweet" is part of her third album, Jubilee (2021), and is a departure from her previous work, which is dreamy and very personal, loaded with themes of grief and mourning as she coped with the 2014 death of her mother. "Be Sweet," on the other hand, is a joyful pop romp where Zauner plays the part of a woman letting her love interest know she's ready to give them a second chance. It wasn't inspired by anyone in particular.
• Michelle Zauner wrote this song in 2018 with Jack Tatum of the band Wild Nothing. Their collaboration was a misunderstanding. As Zauner tells it, her publisher set it up by telling Tatum she wanted to work with him on her new album, and Tatum's publisher did the same. When they got together, they realized they'd been set up - neither was working on an album. So they decided to write a song they could pitch to another artist. "Maybe some C-grade pop algorithm star that would buy our song," Zauner explained to Stereogum.
  
  When they wrote it, Zauner really liked the song, so she decided to keep it. To her, it sounded like fun '80s pop from the likes of Madonna and Whitney Houston. Her Jubilee album was delayed by the pandemic so it wasn't released until 2021, with "Be Sweet" the first single. The song became her most popular track, earning airplay on many adventurous radio stations and expanding her audience considerably.
• 2021 was a big year for Michelle Zauner. Along with breaking through musically with "Be Sweet," she published a memoir called Crying in H Mart, which deals with a lot of the issues she put into the songs on her first two albums, including her struggle with identity as a Korean American and the loss of her mother. She earned high marks from reviewers at the same time her Jubilee album was collecting plaudits.
• Craig Hendrix, a producer and musician highly respected in the Philadelphia music scene, produced this song along with Michelle Zauner and Jack Tatum. Zauner credits him with coming up with the harmonies that power the chorus forward. Tatum and Hendrix played all the instruments on the track.
• Vocally, the song is a stretch for Zauner, who doesn't consider herself an exceptional singer. She was really nervous when she performed it on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
• The song helped earn Japanese Breakfast a Grammy Nomination for Best New Artist even though she put out her first album five years earlier. She lost the award to Olivia Rodrigo.
• Michelle Zauner directed the music video herself. It has an X-Files theme, with her and Marisa Dabice from the band Mannequin Pussy starring as agents investigating paranormal activities. Zauner learned a lot about film and video production at Bryn Mawr College, which she graduated from in 2011. She directs most of her own videos.
• Japanese Breakfast performed "Be Sweet" and "Paprika" when they were the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, May 21, 2022.