In 2021, Japanese Breakfast leader Michelle Zauner published Crying In H Mart, her massively acclaimed memoir, and it’s done about as well as the debut book from an indie musician could possibly do. (Zauner wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, which Will Sharpe is directing.) At the New Yorker festival last year, Zauner said that she was about to move to South Korea to learn Korean and work on her second book. She’s been in Korea for the past six months, and she seems pretty comfortable with the language.

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Last night, Japanese Breakfast played at the Asian Pop Festival in Incheon. According to Setlist.fm, the band’s set included a new song. Zauner also shared the stage with South Korean sing-songwriters Lang Lee and Minhwi Lee to cover a song with a long history. Raimonds Pauls and Leons Briedis, a Latvian composer and poet, wrote “Dāvāja Māriņa meitenei mūžiņu” for a Soviet song contest in 1981. The song, known in English as “Million Roses,” spread throughout the world, with different translations in different languages. It has a special resonance in Korea. North Korean singer Kim Kwang Suk released a version of the song in 1991, and South Korean singer Sim Soo-bong released her take on the ballad in 1997.

If I didn’t have to learn all this history via Wikipedia, I’d probably have a better idea of the context behind Japanese Breakfast’s version of “Million Roses,” and maybe someone in the comments section can lay all that out better. But the Japanese Breakfast version is lovely. Watch fan video from last night’s show below.