"Posing For Cars" by Japanese Breakfast // Song Review

- October 06, 2025

"Posing For Cars" serves as the closing track of Japanese Breakfast's third album, Jubilee, released in 2021. The album arrived soon after the release of Michelle Zauner's debut memoir Crying In H Mart, a which remains one of the most devastating and moving books I have ever read. The way she tells her story with such precision, which is centered around the heartbreak of losing her mother, made me fall in love with her as a writer and artist. Both the memoir and Jubilee reflect beautifully the way she is able to use art as an outlet to process these intense, complicated emotions.

Michelle wrote "Posing For Cars" the same day she composed the album's opener, "Paprika". Though the two songs are very different in tone and style, they beautifully bookend Jubilee in a way that feels so meaningful, as both songs are heavily derived from inside jokes between her and her husband, Peter. The title for "Posing For Cars" was inspired by one of those moments.

"The line 'posing for cars' came about because we were really nervous when we were in this house in the Poconos and we really wanted to hang out outside but every time a car would pass, Peter would pose and look normal and I was cracking up because he was posed in this extremely unnatural way for these cars while trying to look normal," she said in an interview with Stereogum. "It's kind of a meditation on how two different people can love each other. I tend to love very intensely and my partner is someone who has taken a while to come around to it. But I think both loves are very real and that's how love works a lot of the time. Just because it's shown in a different way doesn't make it any less intense."

"And how could you ever conceive, this adolescent heart skipping beats? When all your love, it grows full and firm beneath without a festered thought, without an emerald want, just a single slow desire fermenting," she sings in the second chorus.

"I love a long, six-minute song to show off a little bit. It starts off as an understated acoustic guitar ballad that reminded me of Wilco's 'At Least That's What You Said', which also morphs from this intimate acoustic scene before exploding into a long guitar solo," she said in an interview with Apple Music. "To me, it always has felt like Jeff Tweedy is saying everything that can't be said in that moment through his instrument, and I loved that idea. I wanted to challenge myself to do the same, to write a long, sprawling, emotional solo where I expressed everything that couldn't be said with words."

In the second half, the song then unravels into an over three-minute guitar solo that Michelle performs herself. It's an emotionally charged and psychedelic end to this record. It closes the album with a sense of catharsis, very much echoing the same effect "I Know The End" does for Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher - a motif that I have seen recurring through many artists' work since its release in 2020. In an interview with The Ringer, Michelle said, "I wanted to have this long, sprawling solo, this kind of sonic narrative, where everything that can't be said in the lyrics or in that moment out loud can be expressed through the guitar."