Sable game soundtrack: Japanese Breakfast thinks this is the best song she's ever written. - Slate

Michelle Zauner: This is the first project I think I’ve ever worked on successfully as a creative cog in a larger machine, and it was just really nice to get to work with someone I really trusted as a creative director and work as a collaborator to help uplift a project that was not my vision but a vision I really believed in.

And I’m just in complete wonder that people are able to work on something like this for such a long time.

As someone who has composed music for so long, was there anything where you were like, “I’ve never had to do something like this before”?

It was also really fun to just get to play the builds every week and come up with what I felt like I could contribute to uplift a moment that wasn’t necessarily assigned to me.

They had a few ideas of what should have music and suggestions, but there were also a lot of times where I got to play and was like, “Oh, this seems like something that could feel like a bigger moment if it had a musical theme.”.

Do you feel like you’ve had to tweak the way you think about things for each of those?

It’s really nice to not talk about that anymore and talk about video game composers I like, or video games I’m playing.

I feel like I’m letting go of three of these children that I’ve spent four years with.

… I think also just because it’s an open-world game, and we knew very early on that we wanted to integrate a lot of silence in the same way, and wonder.

I just knew that I wanted to be a part of it.

My manager was like, “This is a huge time commitment, and I don’t know if you’re going to have time to do this.” And I just knew that I had to be a part of it because I thought it was so beautiful, and meeting Daniel and Greg and understanding their work ethic and vision, I just trusted them.

They were very keen on it being an exploration game, and I think Greg’s background in architecture is really interesting and his focus on just creating a world to explore and take in that has no combat, and it being a young girl coming of age.

I literally was going to reference that scene, because I feel like any young woman can relate to just life beating the shit out of you and not being ready for it, and I just love that element of a coming-of-age story where it’s a young person that’s sort of on the precipice of adulthood and something outside of their control kind of pushes them in before they’re ready.

And I feel like that’s very much this story, and I’ve related to Kiki so much as a young adult just finding out how much a frying pan costs—just how exhausting adulthood is?

Was there anything like that that you also found a lot of inspiration from in your life, outside of other video games.

I think I was just so impatient to get started.

And then it wasn’t until 2020 that I started actually getting builds and getting to play the game and realizing what fit and what didn’t fit.

Have you gotten to play the full game already.

I really would love to stream the game at some point when I’m off tour, because I have played the game for hundreds of hours, front to back, in varying stages of development, but not in its entirely polished, finished state.