Everybody Wants To Love You

Album: Psychopomp (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • An early Japanese Breakfast song, "Everybody Wants To Love You" appears on her 2016 debut album, Psychopomp. The song is a kind of fantasy where Michelle Zauner (Japanese Breakfast is the name she uses to release music) gets a flush of passion for a person and starts thinking about how they can get together, spend the night, fall in love and get married.

    Speaking with The Mac Weekly, she said it's about "a very sweet, generous, loving situation that was just for one day," adding, "I felt so cocky about that experience... but I think it was like so tongue-in-cheek that it also feels sort of lonely in a way."
  • In 2017, Zauner tweeted: "Everybody Wants to Love You was written about my relationship with a woman who has no idea I wrote it for her."

    Zauner has openly identified as bisexual.
  • Michelle Zauner wrote the song in 2010 when she was a student at Bryn Mawr College. After graduating in 2011, she stayed in the Philadelphia area and formed a band called Little Big League that released two albums before she rebranded as Japanese Breakfast and started making music on her own.
  • Zauner hadn't committed herself to music when she released this song in 2016. She was working as a sales coordinator at a company in Brooklyn called Colossal Media, which sets up outdoor advertising displays, with Japanese Breakfast a side hustle. The Psychopomp album was released on a small label called Yellow K Records with modest expectations. Zauner's job prevented her from touring to support the album but she played the South By Southwest Festival that March and got a lot of attention, including from Dead Oceans Records (home to Cassandra Jenkins and Bright Eyes), which signed her and re-released the album.
  • "Everybody Wants To Love You" is one of the most popular and recognizable Japanese Breakfast tracks, played at just about every live show.
  • Michelle Zauner was born in South Korea and came to America with her family when she was still a baby. Some of her early songs deal with her mother, who died of cancer in 2014. "Everybody Wants To Love You" doesn't, but the video shows Zauner wearing her mother's wedding hanbok, a traditional Korean dress. But instead of attending a formal event, Zauner smokes, drinks and plays pool - activities that would be frowned upon. It's a nod to her heritage while upending expectations.

    Zauner directed the video herself and is quite proud of it. "The concept was perfect, the execution was perfect," she said.

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