Japanese Breakfast has spoken about her recent team-up with much-loved 2021 Great British Bake Off contestant Jürgen Krauss.

Krauss joined Michelle Zauner as a special guest on trombone for ‘Slide Tackle’ at the Kentish Town Forum in London last month. The baker also made matcha white chocolate shortbread for the band.

Now, Zauner has explained to NME why the collaboration came about in this week’s The Big Read.

Amidst the relentlessness and isolation of pandemic touring, Zauner and her band developed a tradition of watching Bake Off together every Friday, she said.

The singer-songwriter added: “Jürgen was our favourite. We all rooted for him. It feels so full circle that he’s here, playing trombone with us, on our last leg. We made a home on the road through him.”

Elsewhere in the interview, she also spoke about her experience of working with The 1975 on their new album ‘Part Of The Band‘.

Zauner said that collaboration came about thanks to co-producer Jack Antonoff, whom she met while recording at New York’s Electric Lady Studios.

“I was actually feeling kind of insecure that no one had ever asked me to sing on a project”, she said. “I guess I have kind of a weird voice, not an objectively ‘pretty’ one to layer on someone else’s. One day Jack texted me: ‘Do you like The 1975?’ – who are one of my favourite bands. ‘How soon can you be at Electric Lady?’ I was still in my pyjamas, probably hungover. I took a shower and got on the train.”

She went on to talk about the sobering financial realities of touring in a post pandemic era.

“I live in constant fear of the moment where we plateau or decline and have to scale back”, Zauner shared. “It’s so much easier to bring people on than to scale down. We don’t have our lighting designer for this [tour] run, and it feels so sad and different. Their absence is really felt.”