Wow, what can I say?!

I can say that I’m ashamed that it took an Old Navy commercial to get me to fall in love with that voice. But, oh, what a voice.

Let me just say this: Ingrid Michaelson hits my ear drums just right. There is no one else I’ve found who’s music is as fulfilling as hers.

I’ve always been a sucker for singer-songwriter women. Any time a friend or an acquaintance performed in my presence, I’ve sworn I was going to marry them. Once upon a time, it was a requirement that the woman I married had to sing and play piano or guitar. I’ve laxed on that requirement a bit, but Ingrid Michaelson has at least put the thought back in my mind.

If any of you are still unaware of her music, It’s entirely possible that I’m building her up so much that there’s no way she’ll live up to it. I’m sorry.

The real attraction to Ingrid Michaelson is that it’s her music —

and it’s not over-produced crap. Her album Girls and Boys was self-produced and climbed as high as #2 on the iTunes charts. It’s been featured several times in the television series Grey’s Anatomy, as well as the aforementioned Old Navy commercial.

According to a New York Times article on Michaelson last week, until May, she “was teaching in an after-school theater program in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island, where she still lives with her parents, a dog and a pet rabbit in the house she has inhabited since she was born”

“I listened to her song ‘Breakable’ about 40 times in a row, and I completely fell in love with the song,” Ms. Grossman said, referring to a surprisingly buoyant song about human fragility.Ms. Grossman’s visceral reaction to the material astonished her. After years in the music industry, she said, she had considered herself desensitized. “It’s really rare when something pierces through,” she said.

For those of you who live locally (in reference to this blog), Ingrid Michaelson will be performing on January 20th at the Doug Fir Lounge on Burnside in Portland.Below I’ve featured the music video for ‘Here I Am.’ She can be found on iTunes, MySpace, and Virb.

This post is tagged Ingrid Michaelson, Music