Show Review: Japanese Breakfast with Ginger Root at Woodland Park Zoo, 9/3/25

I first became familiar with Japanese Breakfast when they were the musical guest on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live hosted by Natasha Lyonne back in 2022. At the time, they were in the middle of the Jubilee album cycle, and they played the singles “Be Sweet” and “Paprika”. I was impressed enough by their SNL performances that I searched out and listened to Jubilee a few times, and I enjoyed it well enough. However, it fell out of favor for other listening, and I never came back to it. Not because I didn’t like it, but because sometimes a piece of art gets listened to at a time when other things are going on, and maybe you’re just not ready for it.

Fast forward to July 27th, 2025, and seeing Japanese Breakfast became my major highlight of attending Project Pabst in Portland, Oregon. If you’ve been reading my Spinning Platters reviews, you’ll know that I completely freaked out and totally fell in love hearing Japanese Breakfast this time around. Gone was the indifference about wanting to hear more, and I am proud to say I dove in headfirst since then. Listening to every album and deep diving hard throughout the 38 days between the aforementioned PDX music festival set and the headlining Woodland Park Zoo concert I’m writing about here became a labor of love, and I am beyond thrilled and fulfilled at having decided to do so.

Ginger Root

Cameron Lew and two of his friends that he’s known since high school Dylan Hovis (bass) and Matt Carney (drums) are as he puts it “an art collective” called Ginger Root. From what I could gather in researching them, Cameron plays and writes all of the albums himself and employs his friends to bring his music to the masses, with stellar live arrangements and sections of improvisation while they’re on tour.

In mid-2016, when a number of songs Lew wrote didn’t quite fit the band he was in at the time, he decided to compile them into an EP, which eventually evolved into an LP. Thus, the first Ginger Root album was born. Since then, Cameron Lew has released 6 EPs, 4 albums, and an Adult Swim Toonami feature film-length movie. To say that Cameron is ambitious would be an understatement. They are currently touring a concept album, SHINBANGUMI, which features a full movie that accompanies it. This movie weaves music videos for each song from the album and storytelling elements together into one long narrative piece of art, set in the same fictional universe as the EP Nisemono, which preceded it. Ginger Root is an incredibly visual band, but due to the show being held outdoors and the early stage time they played at, the visual components to Ginger Root’s set were essentially not viewable throughout their performance.

Lew has comedically described Ginger Root as “aggressive elevator music.” What I experienced was a groove-heavy power trio that, at times, had a swing to it, sounding like they were just as influenced by City Pop as they were by Hall & Oates.

Cameron uses too many keyboard patches to list off, but sticks with an electric piano sound for the majority of the songs. The electric piano patch with an engaged sustain pedal has a way of filling out the space that a three-piece music combo can do. More than a few times, I had to remind myself that only three people were on stage. Both Dylan and Matt round out the sound in dynamic and interesting ways. Cameron himself is a performer and an incredible multi-instrumentalist. Suppose you divert your attention from the stage for even a second. In that case, you might look back to see him playing a Suzuki Andes 25F (a melodica-like, breath-operated Andes flute keyboard-oriented instrument), beating cowbells, or playing rock and funk electric guitar. Or maybe he puts it all down and pops and locks center stage. He knows he’s on stage to entertain, and he takes every chance, “They said they said if you’re not loud enough they’d set the rhinoceros on stage,” he joked as the band readied to play the following number.

Ginger Root makes all of their own videos and produces all of their own art. They are like no one else out there right now. It is a remarkable feat to make a band of this small size sound as big as they do, and they are incredibly gifted musicians in every sense of the word. Towards the end of their set, Cameron began hitting incredibly high falsetto notes that he had not indicated throughout the preceding songs. I was totally blown away.

To close their set, Lew told a story about being in college in the early days of Ginger Root and driving to Austin during SXSW only to play a pool party with no one in attendance, and about how, while on the road, he wrote an essay for school about Japanese Breakfast’s Psychopomp. “If there’s something you want to do, you’re going to fail, but that’s ok. Because one day, you too will tour with Japanese Breakfast!” What followed was their closing song, “Show Ten.” A show stopper with over the top improvisation, screaming getting looped, Talking Heads like funk guitar, disco funk jamming, a once through of a full on boogie woogie 12 bar blues with Prince energy and Cameron calling out James Brown “hit me!”s building in energy until to close he yelled “Hit me 14 times and we out.” 14 blasts of sound later, and Ginger Root stopped on a dime, ending their dramatic daytime performance. I’ll be making it a point to see them the next time they’re here at a club. What a way to see a band for the first time.

[Show as slideshow]

Ginger Root Set List

Better Than Monday

Karaoke

Over the Hill

No Problems

There Was a Time

Only You

Giddy Up

(DRONE)

Loretta

Show 10

Japanese Breakfast

Sometimes when you go see a band, you wonder what exactly is going to be different than the last time you saw them. You wonder about what songs you’ll hear and about what the energy will be like and how the band will be playing on each particular night. When Japanese Breakfast came to the stage, each band member walked out before front woman and band leader Michelle Zauner walked out to the lip of the stage and lit a lantern, holding it high, eliciting cheers, before placing it next to an enormous open seashell, which is the centerpiece of the stage dressing. Zauner sat down in the middle of the shell, an acoustic guitar placed in her hands, a mic stand set up for her, and the band launched into their opening song, “Here is Someone”, the opening track off of the newest album, Songs for Brunettes (and Sad Women). Instantly, I knew this was going to be dramatically different from what I witnessed at Project Pabst. Michelle’s long-time guitar-playing husband and band mate, Peter Bradley, and Japanese Breakfast’s bass player, Deven Craige, sat next to the clamshell accompanying their band leader as drummer Craig Hendrix, violin and synth player Lauren Baba, and Keys/Sax player Adam Shatz all played large wooden recorders, filling out the gorgeous live interpretation of the song. What a haunting and special way to begin a show.

Michelle stood up for the next number while continuing to play her black Gibson acoustic guitar, which she seemed to prefer at the moment, and “Orlando in Love” began, the second song from Brunettes in its original album order. Halfway through the third stanza, Michelle sang the lyric that addressed the stage dressing: “She came to him from the water like Venus from a shell.” Song three was “Honey Water,” which made 3 for 3 of the Brunettes’ songs played in album order. Michelle’s cream-colored tortoiseshell pick guard, a 1960s Fender Jazzmaster, dripped with feedback as she wrangled the waves of sound into melodies with the tips of her fingers. Occasionally, she leaned down to tweak knobs on her pedals to give the sound a subtle shape that must have changed between soundcheck and stage time. The reverberations move differently with the audience, displacing the openness. When I saw “Honey Water” in July, it meant something different than it did this night. Now I know this song. Now I feel the lyrics to it. Now I anticipated the chord changes because I knew them. I had a relationship with this art now, and being there in that moment when writing about her Portland “Honey Water” solo brought me into Japanese Breakfast’s world. Is there anything better than watching your favorite artists speak directly to you without saying a single word to you?

“Seattle has been really good to us.” Michelle said, “We’re playing two nights here in Seattle. We have a special show for you.” Throughout the evening at least one song from every album was represented including several from Jubilee and every song off of For Melancholy Brunettes (Sad Women) except for the first song off of side B “Leda”. Michelle was in a jovial and jokey mood and commented about how many dads were there with their kids before introducing songs with humorous one-sentence song histories like, “This is about my time working at a Mexican fusion restaurant and being cuckolded by men.”

As the set progressed and the sun began to set, the massive amounts of smoke, combined with the lights, created an energy reminiscent of a giant aquarium throughout the night. None of this was present during the Project Pabst show, which took place in the early evening with daylight setting. The band is consistently super tight, and the color that multi-instrumentalists Lauren Baba and

Adam Shatz being in the band cannot be lauded enough. Every piece of the band is integral to weaving the pieces together to create unassailable love arrangements of the way the songs are represented on the albums. Criaig Hendrix and Deven Craige’s rhythm section holds down the foundation so incredibly well that one would be hard-pressed ever to find an example of a mistake.

From epic guitar solos to large heartfelt love songs and melancholic introspections, Japanese Breakfast creates a story-like arc with their setlist construction. When Michele puts down her guitar and focuses on the mic, she’s going to give every corner of the stage some love as she’s either dancing around and chiding the audience, “Let’s pick it up, Seattle!” or she’s belting it with everything she’s got. The set closing “Posing in Bondage” contained this powerful moment of her just wailing on the chorus, hitting her vocal parts with everything she’s got from inside a giant shell while the lights and smoke were at full bore: an unbelievable way to end a set, and rock band theatrical stage craft at its best.

When Zauner returned to the stage, she did so alone with only her trusty black Gibson guitar by her side. She thanked Ginger Root for joining them and the crew for all the hard work they were putting into such an incredibly complicated show each night. “I know some of you don’t want to hear this.” Michelle said, “Summer is almost over. Pumpkin Spice is coming. We’re leaving the West Coast and heading to my least favorite region of food, which is brew pub. So I’m stocking up on Asian food here in Seattle. I wrote this song about doing naughty…“ She stopped herself and reframed her thought, “I wrote this song about a funny experience, but it’s oddly kind of become about a lot of you.” Michelle began Jubilee’s closing track, “Posing for Cars,” by herself, solo on acoustic guitar, gentle and delicate. A verse in, and her husband Peter had joined her, not on guitar but on electric piano. By the time the second chorus of the song had come around, the entire band had joined her. The ballad became an explosion of energy emanating from the stage as the post-chorus violin solo wailed over the exuberant audience. The first single from Japanese Breakfast, “Paprika,” followed, arguably their most popular song to date. Michelle smashed a gong between refrains, whipping the audience into a veritable frenzy.

The last song of the evening, “Diving Women,” was a gigantic event with the entire band swooning and soloing together in a sort of shoegaze spectacular. Shredding through the massive lilt as the energy of the whole evening crescendoed, crashing into the shore of the audience over and over again until the water calmed and the tide receded.

I attended this show because I saw a band at a festival, and they spoke to me in a way that the other bands didn’t. As I get older, I find myself challenging myself to get into bands that don’t speak to me right away. What’s odd about that is that I know when the right band comes along at the right moment, I never need to try to “get it”; it just happens organically. This show was one of the top ten concerts of all time for me. I can hardly believe I’m saying that. This exceeded all expectations.