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Ingrid Michaelson Issue #34

After a little help from Grey’s Anatomy and a number of label offers, the singer-songwriter decides to self-release her latest album

By Elizabeth Rhodes
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 2:04pm

Talk about buzz. After four Ingrid Michaelson songs aired on Grey’s Anatomy episodes in 2006 — with the melancholy, effortlessly beautiful “Keep Breathing” occupying the season finale’s six-minute climax and reaching more than 20 million viewers — the unsigned artist and her music became the most Googled items in the country.

“It’s so bizarre,” says Michaelson, as the Staten Island native maneuvers through New York traffic and eventually parallel parks one-handed. “That’s the one feeling I get — not pride. Most of the time it just feels like a strange alternate world I’m going through.”

The daughter of a classical composer, Michaelson began learning piano at age 4 and describes her brand of indie pop as “cleverly obvious.” Her 2005 debut, Slow the Rain, reflects the musical theater she studied at college. The singer-songwriter’s gift for catchy, understated melodies and vocal harmonies is better developed on September 2007’s Girls and Boys. The album is a collection of sweet, thoughtful love songs written on the guitar. “I was listening to a lot of Death Cab for Cutie and Magnetic Fields,” she says, citing Death Cab’s “I Will Follow You into the Dark” as one of her favorite love songs.

Multiple major and independent labels have approached Michaelson, who quit her day job at the NYC Parks Department’s kids theater program in May 2007 and now releases her music on her own Cabin 24 Records. “I continue to be independent because the world of music is changing drastically, and the value of the independent artist has gone up due to MySpace and iTunes,” she says. “Why not see how strong I can become on my own before joining a label?”

Girls and Boys received even more exposure when the sun-kissed island rhythms, soft guitar, and apropos lyrics (“If you are chilly, here take my sweater”) of album-centerpiece “The Way I Am” helped sell cardigans and pullovers during Old Navy’s fall commercial campaign. “There’s always going to be people who call you a sell-out,” Michaelson says. “I get that for having my song on Old Navy commercials, but that’s how I’m making a living. Everyone is calling me an independent success and saying, ‘Oh, she’s never going to sign.’ I’ve never said any of that.”

With a third album already written, Michaelson toured with emo rocker Matt Nathanson in the fall and is spending much of 2008 on the road. “When you’re starting out, you have pockets of fans, but you don’t have a guaranteed cushion of 500 wherever you go,” she says. “There are some times when you’ll be playing and nobody listens and you feel 2 inches tall. There are others when there are hundreds of people singing along.”

What’s Michaelson’s tactic for handling the highs and lows? “I try not to get too excited because I feel like it’s dangerous,” she says. “I’ve gotten pretty good at mellowing out.”

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