After the otherworldly escapades in the music videos for "Machinist" and "Road Head", Japanese Breakfast (Oregon singer-songwriter and guitarist Michelle Zauner) keeps her feet firmly on this planet in her autobiographical music video for "The Body is a Blade". The sharpness of her central metaphor is softened by nostalgic old photos of Zauner's parents and Zauner as a baby and child. She slashes her way through a field, takes a swim in a lake, sings her heart out on a deserted beach and frolics around the Asbury Park boardwalk - the same locations where some of the photos were taken. The sepia-tinted images cohere easily with the song's comforting and hazy production, courtesy of the breezy keyboard sounds produced by the Juno 6 analog synthesizer.
Zauner's vocals are hazy and indistinct, mirroring the peripatetic existence she sings about: "Calling it off, our hoax of trying/ What’s this place if you’re not here?/ Emptied the house and staged it for buying/ Wave goodbye to all your things". As she revealed to in July this year, "the song is about trying to figure out how to be a good person after something really terrible happens in your life. It's about disassociating from trauma and relying on your body to physically keep pushing forward in an attempt to survive." She works within a narrow emotive range throughout the song, but this is enough to simultaneously signal the burden of grief and the exhilaration of emotional growth: "Your body is a blade that moves while your brain is writhing/Knuckled under pain, you mourn but your blood is flowing".
