[Photo by: Peter Ash Lee]
Michelle Zauner knows a thing or two about grief. After a few years in Philly indie-emo band Little Big League, the Seoul, South Korea-born Zauner moved back to her hometown of Eugene, Oregon, to care for her mother, then diagnosed with stage 4 gastrointestinal cancer. She died six months later.
In the wake of that unimaginable agony, Zauner wrote her first two albums as a soloist under the name
Psychopomp, a gorgeous, shimmering rumination on loss, and in 2017,
Soft Sounds From Another Planet, loosely inspired by an obsession with the Mars One project (a privately owned operation with the goal of establishing a human colony on Mars). Of course, her planetary ambition was more of a metaphor disassociating from her matriarchal trauma to preserve her sanity, looking beyond Earth to establish the most distance between herself and her pain.