Songfacts®:

• This spicy song tells the tale of a mushroom-induced dream Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast had while on a trip to the Poconos with her husband Peter. She was trying to defeat a case of writer's block, and it worked.
  
  According to Zauner, after taking the mushrooms she opened the door and there was a deer she fed bread out of her hand. She got a euphoric feeling she somehow remembered the next day.
  
  "I went to bed with a raging headache because I realized I was just staring into the sun for an hour," she told Stereogum. "So I went to bed and I had this really vivid dream about having a really long braid that came unraveled."
  
  She was listening to a lot of Kate Bush at the time, and put the song together in that lyrically adventurous style with the kind of backing track Bush might have created back in the '80s and '90s. Like much of Bush's work, the song tells a very abstract story but more importantly captures a feeling, which in this case is joy and discovery.
• Like many Japanese Breakfast songs, the title doesn't appear in the lyric. It's named "Paprika" after a 2006 anime film of that title with music by Susumu Hirasawa, one of Michelle Zauner's favorites. After writing the song, it reminded her of a song from the film called "Parade" that plays in a "really psychotic parade dream sequence."
• Michelle Zauner called in the troops to add instrumentation on "Paprika." When she put the track together, she did it electronically using synth plugins to emulate the Kate Bush sound (like a Fairlight CMI that you can hear on "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)"). But she wanted real instruments on the track, so she and her producer Craig Hendrix replaced those parts with layers of drums to give it a marching band feel and called in their musical friends to add horns and strings. They ended up filling up all the tracks in their ProTools workspace.
• "Paprika" is the opening track to the third Japanese Breakfast album, Jubilee. When Michelle Zauner started Japanese Breakfast in 2013 it was a side project, and even when she put out the first album in 2016, music was still a part-time endeavor as she worked a real job in sales and marketing. It was a performance at South By Southwest that year that changed her trajectory - it got the attention of the Dead Oceans label, which signed her and gave her the support she needed to get to the next level. The next album appeared in 2017 but it was Jubilee in 2021 that earned Grammy nominations and talk show appearances. That same year, Zauner released Crying in H Mart: A Memoir, which ended up on best-seller lists for nonfiction books.