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LOS ANGELES — Amanda Kloots is not surprised that she’s famous.You don’t move to New York from Ohio at 18, go to countless thanks-but-no-thanks auditions, dust yourself off again and again, or practice tap dance nightly on your small apartment bathroom floor in case a spot in the ensemble for “42nd Street” or the Rockettes opens because you think you are best suited to a life of quiet anonymity. More
David Balfe never thought the public would hear his deeply personal debut album. But it became a runaway success in his native Ireland.David Balfe feels guilty. The Irish musician’s debut album “For Those I Love,” which he recorded under the same name, has had the kind of success most artists only dream of: It has won widespread critical praise and was only beaten to the No. 1 spot in the Irish album charts by Justin Bieber.But the record wasn’t made for public release, and Balfe said he feels uncomfortable receiving recognition for an album about his working-class Dublin childhood and a friend’s recent death.“I seem to have benefited from the release of these difficult and deeply personal stories,” Balfe, 29, said in a recent video interview. “It’s a little bit out of my control now.”He described the album — which depicts gang violence, poverty and substance addiction — as “storytelling set against a backdrop of electronica.” Its lyrics mix reminiscences of all-night parties with Balfe’s close circle of friends and indictments of wealth inequality in Ireland — a country where both house prices and homelessness rates have surged in recent years.Balfe grew up in the North Dublin suburb of Donaghmede, but went to school and had family and friends in nearby Coolock, where crime levels were rising throughout his teenage years. “I emerged at a young age into quite a violent backdrop and aggressive place,” he said. To survive there, he added, “I needed to learn a coldness.”On the album, Balfe explores death, grief and inequality in Dublin, which he said were all “intrinsically linked.” On one track, “Birthday/The Pain,” he recalls a homeless man who was murdered on the street where he lived when he was six.Balfe said he was “struck by the universal acceptance of a record that is so descriptive of a very specific piece of geography,” adding that he was surprised to see the “minutiae of a world that I grew up in resonating with people from a world so far from mine.”Balfe’s best friend, Paul Curran, played a key role in many of the stories told on “For Those I Love.” They met in high school, and Curran went on to become a popular spoken word artist, writing and performing work about everything from politics to soccer.At Chanel College, in Coolock, the two discovered music in lunchtime guitar jam sessions organized by an English teacher, Mick Phelan. “David and Paul were non-judgemental,” Phelan said of Balfe and Curran in a video interview. “They had their friends, but they talked to everyone. I saw a humanity and a maturity in them that I don’t often see in teenage lads.”After graduating, Balfe and Curran continued making music and art together: first in a hardcore band called Plagues; later, as part of Burnt Out, a collective that made audiovisual works that addressed youth unemployment in Coolock, which was running at around 25 percent throughout Ireland at the time.Balfe returned to the problems of Dublin’s suburbs in 2017, when he began “For Those I Love,” layering vocals over a solo instrumental project he put together in his mother’s garden shed. He brought his own voice — half-sung, half-spoken, in a strong Irish brogue — to the sample-heavy dance music he had written, mixing in snippets of WhatsApp voice notes and spoken word work by Curran.The tracks were made to share with his closest friends and his family, he said: “A document of love and thanks for the sacrifices they made.”In April, Balfe released a short film, “Holy Trinity,” as part of the For Those I Love project. Tiberio VenturaBut in February 2018, Paul Curran died by suicide and Balfe, grief-stricken, put “For Those I Love” on pause. The next few months were “a thundering whirlwind of chaos,” he said, that felt like “a day and a decade in one.”“In the shadow of grief, all of us were very different people,” he said. “It’s very easy to believe that you might never be creative again.”Balfe’s return to writing music was the “first step in the recovery” after Curran’s death, he added. Some of the material, like the opening track “I Have a Love,” was rewritten completely, changing from an ode to his group of friends to a eulogy to Curran; nostalgic new songs, such as “You Stayed,” were added.“It was very much a mode of self expression and survival at the time,” Balfe said.When “For Those I Love” was finished, in May 2019, Balfe put it on the independent music platform Bandcamp, to share with family and friends. A few Irish music blogs found it, too, and the record received some favorable reviews. But Balfe’s fortunes really changed when “For Those I Love” came to the attention of Ash Houghton, an A&R manager at September Recordings, which also represents Adele and London Grammar.“The album speaks for itself,” Houghton said in an email. “My only thought at the time was that it would be a tragedy if more people weren’t able to hear it.”Houghton offered a release on the label, yet Balfe initially was hesitant to share such personal work with a wider audience, he said. But friends who had also known Curran suggested the album could help others, he said, “and speak to them as they move through their own grief.”In March, September Recordings rereleased “For Those I Love,” which entered the Irish album charts at No. 2, and Balfe’s debut live show in Dublin, scheduled for October, sold out in 10 minutes.Niall Byrne, the editor of Nialler9.com, an Irish music site that was one of the album’s early champions, said in a video interview that, while many Irish musicians were producing good music, “you don’t hear a lot of rawness.” It was this quality, he added, that set Balfe’s record apart.A recent wave of new artists, he said — including Balfe, the group Pillow Queens and the post-punk band the Murder Capital — were “less defined by genre or sound,” but rather “by the sensibility and values their music holds. Their lyrics are informed by real issues.”Balfe said he was working on a new album, that would also be informed by Dublin and its politics, but that the project had hit a “frustratingly stagnant brick wall.” Despite the success of “For Those I Love,” he was still working “a day job,” he said — though he didn’t want to say what that was. He kept the job, which he had before signing the record deal, out of “fear of turning the thing that I love the most, the creative pursuits, into labor.”Since the wider release of “For Those I Love,” Balfe said, fans had been messaging him on social media, to share how the record has “helped them shake their grief.”He still mourns Curran, he said: “A semi-successful local record isn’t going to make that better.” But, he added, he was happy that his music has touched others. “Those responses,” he said, “have gone a long way to help with some of the guilt.” More
Michelle Zauner, a musician who performs under the name Japanese Breakfast, is making her book debut with “Crying in H Mart.”After an hour of discussing her mother, the afterlife and the shamelessness sometimes required in producing art, Michelle Zauner adjusted her video camera to show her Bushwick apartment. Her coffee table, suddenly in view, was covered with Jolly Pong Cereal Snack, NongShim Shrimp Crackers, Lotte Malang Cow Milk Candies and other Asian junk food.“This whole time we’ve been talking,” she said, “you’ve been in front of these snacks.”These are her favorite selections from H Mart, the Korean-American supermarket chain that for her serves as both muse and refuge. Zauner, best known for her music project Japanese Breakfast, wrote about the “beautiful, holy place” and the death of her mother, Chongmi, in a 2018 essay for The New Yorker, “Crying in H Mart,” which led to a memoir by the same name that Knopf is publishing on Tuesday.In the essay, which is the first chapter of her book, she relayed her grief, her appetite and her fear that, after losing Chongmi to cancer in 2014, “am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?” The rest of the memoir explores her identity as a biracial Asian-American, the bonds that food can forge and her efforts to understand and remember her mother.Zauner at home in Brooklyn with a painting by her mother.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesZauner’s parents met in Seoul in the early 1980s, when her father, Joel, moved there from the United States to sell cars to the American and Canadian military. Chongmi was working at the hotel where he stayed. They married after three months of dating and traveled through Japan, Germany and South Korea again before landing in Eugene, Ore., where Michelle Zauner grew up. In early drafts of the book, she said during our interview, she tried to imagine what it was like for her mother to marry so quickly, to face a language barrier with her husband, to uproot herself over and over. When she asked her father questions like “Do you remember how she was feeling?,” he answered with geographical facts and figures.As with many immigration stories, scarcity threaded its way through a lot of what Zauner found while writing the book: In their family, her father was so focused on providing that he couldn’t give her the emotional support she sought, while her mother viewed identity crises almost as a waste of energy. “I feel like she’d be moved by parts of the book,” Zauner said, “but I think there are parts she’d think, ‘I don’t know why you had to go on about this for the whole book when you’re just like an American kid.’”Zauner, 32, writes about their volatile relationship, contrasting her mother’s poised restraint with her need to express herself, her sense of urgency that “no one could possibly understand what I went through and I needed everyone to know.”After graduating from Bryn Mawr, she threw herself into the Philadelphia rock band Little Big League in 2011 before striking out on her own as Japanese Breakfast. Her first two solo albums, like her memoir, focused on grief: “Psychopomp,” in 2016, and “Soft Sounds From Another Planet,” in 2017. Her next one, “Jubilee,” is scheduled for release in June, and it is more joyful, influenced by Kate Bush, Björk and Randy Newman. In between these projects, she worked on video game soundtracks, directed music videos and crashed into the literary world, reflecting her maximalist and, yes, shameless approach to creativity.“The thing about Michelle is you just need to give her a little push in that direction — an affirmation — and suddenly she’s just flying,” said Daniel Torday, a novelist and the director of the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr, who has been a mentor to Zauner.For her the artistic process, whether it is in her music or her writing, often feels all-consuming and anxiety-producing, something she handles by working through it. “If I’m going to take the time to go in on something,” Zauner said, “I want to be terrified of it.”And there are terrifying parts she confronts when retracing the last few months of her mother’s life. It is not exactly the cancer — in the book, she describes the disease with polish, crushing Vicodin for her mother with a spoon and scattering its blue crumbs over scoops of ice cream “like narcotic sprinkles.” It is that Chongmi was dying just as their relationship was at its best, “a sort of renaissance period, where we were really getting to enjoy each other’s company and know each other as adults,” Zauner said.In 2014, she moved back home to help care for her. Chongmi died that October, two weeks after Michelle Zauner married Peter Bradley, a fellow musician. By Christmas, he joined her and her father in Eugene, navigating the first heavy moment of their new life together — “like a baptism of adulthood,” Bradley said.“Crying in H Mart” is out on April 20.She and her father haven’t been in contact for more than a year, save for an attempt at therapy over Zoom. After her mother died, “our grief couldn’t come together in this way where we could experience it together,” Zauner said. “He started wearing this big ruby in his ear and then got a big tattoo, lost 40 pounds, started dating this young woman, and it felt like kind of a second death.”In an essay for Harper’s Bazaar published earlier this month, she wrote about the pain of that experience, then searching for a way to make peace with him and his new relationship, which has since ended.Joel Zauner, in a phone interview, expressed sadness about their estrangement. He avoided reading “Crying in H Mart” for months (Michelle Zauner sent him an advance copy), but when he did, he wept throughout and was stung that he wasn’t included in the acknowledgments. The tattoo was done on the anniversary of Chongmi’s death, he said, and is of her name in Korean, with the Korean word for “sweetheart” underneath.“I’m not a perfect guy,” he said. “But I certainly deserve more than I was given in both the article and the book.”Today, Zauner feels ready to shake this period of loss and just tour, and there is still more she wants to unpack about being Korean, possibly by living there for a year. “I think there’s a big part of my sense of belonging that is missing because I don’t speak the language fluently,” she said, and she is determined to preserve the thread she has to the Korean side of her family.She became engrossed at one point with Emily Kim, who as Maangchi is known as “YouTube’s Korean Julia Child,” finding peace in the way she peeled Korean pears — “the Korean way,” Kim wrote in an email — using the knife to remove the skin in one long strip, the way Chongmi used to. In 2019, the two starred in a Vice video that explored the effects of migration on cuisine, and on Zauner’s 30th birthday, Kim made her dinner. “She’s a real Korean daughter,” Kim said.Zauner feels wary, however, about her work in any conjunction with the anti-Asian attacks in the past year. “I’m fearful of using this tragedy to try and promote anything I’ve created,” she said over email the day after the Atlanta shootings. “It’s a little hard to encapsulate my feelings on such a heavy thing with a few words.”Her belief system these days has become more nuanced than before. She is an atheist, “but then there has to be some smudging of the edges for me,” she said. “In some ways it is impossible for me to not feel like my mother was looking out for me because of the serendipitous, fateful way that things happened in my life.”Almost a year ago, when she finished writing “Crying in H Mart,” she posted a photo of herself in her living room with her eyes closed and a peaceful smile, holding the book’s draft in her hands, with the caption “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.”There are instances when even though it goes against everything you believe, it’s important, Zauner said, to create an ambiguous space for things.“Like when I leave flowers on her grave, I know technically what I am doing is I’m leaving the flowers for myself. I’m creating a ritual and commemorating her with my time by doing this. But that is not enough for me to feel OK about it,” she said. “I need to kind of believe that she knows that they’re there.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Beautiful Something Left Behind’ Review: Young Children and the Trauma of Lost ParentsIn her new documentary, Katrine Philp takes us into Good Grief, a facility that helps the very young deal with unspeakable loss.A scene from Katrine Philp’s documentary “Beautiful Something Left Behind.”Credit…MTV Documentary FilmsJan. 7, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe death of a parent, at almost any age, leaves a mark, but the effect it has on very young children is especially confounding. “Beautiful Something Left Behind” is a simple, elegant documentary about children coping with such heartbreaking loss, at a facility designed especially for them.It’s a place called Good Grief, a large clapboard house in New Jersey (the film focuses on its Morristown location, one of two in the state). In a one-on-one session with an adult staff member, a child tries to give colors to his feelings. Blue and red, he says, are how he feels when he’s “sad and really mad.” The movie then shows a group-therapy session, with children from six to about 10 years old doing recovery-room-style sharing.[embedded content]We like to think of children as being more emotionally candid and expressive than adults. Among the moments this picture, directed by Katrine Philp, shows us is how kids put on brave faces and try to deflect what they’re actually feeling. This is even more painful to witness than a child’s overt sadness. Also striking is how the children are made to understand the way some parents met their ends. You may shudder when one uses “bad medicine” to describe the cause of his father’s death.Philp does not have any talking-head interviews with the staff of Good Grief; only the children address the camera directly. She structures the movie in a loose, satisfying seasons-of-the-year narrative.It could be argued that the film needed a little more documentary-style explanation about how the facility works — how long children stay, the goals of the treatment, and so on. But ultimately, Philp can’t be blamed for stressing emotional engagement over exposition.Beautiful Something Left BehindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
