Songfacts®:

• "Winter in LA" is Japanese Breakfast's shimmering postcard from the wrong side of paradise. Written by frontwoman Michelle Zauner during a December 2024 recording stint in Los Angeles, the track contrasts golden-hour sunsets with the gray churn of inner turmoil. As Zauner told Paper magazine, "I was watching people eat Thanksgiving dinner outside, which was so surreal. I have a really bad relationship with the city. I get severely depressed."
• While most of LA was busy basking in vitamin D and wellness smoothies, Zauner was quietly unraveling, trying to square the disconnect between her surroundings and her own melancholic state. The song captures that internal contradiction.
  
  I wish you had a happier woman
  One that could leave the house
  
  Zauner, ever the anti-angelino, told Mojo magazine: "I'm very not an LA kind of person. I always get depressed when I'm there. I get really confused when I feel gloomy and it's so nice out. I was thinking about all these amazing musicians - Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Bob Dylan - who have had these really fruitful LA years. I was like, what is wrong with me? Why do I have to suffer through everything?"
• "Winter in LA" was the final track recorded for Japanese Breakfast's fourth album, Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women). The album, co-produced with Blake Mills (Sky Ferreira, Fiona Apple), explores what Zauner calls "anticipatory grief" - that low-grade dread humming beneath even life's most beautiful moments.
• The video, co-directed by Zauner and Peter Ash Lee and shot in South Korea, gives visual form to the song's emotional dissonance. It centers on a bride unraveling during her own wedding.