In the Studio With... Ingrid Michaelson

Perched on a stool in the center of a Manhattan studio control room, Ingrid Michaelson stares through glass. On the other side, a cellist, a violist and a violinist play flourishes the songwriter herself can hardly handle. “It just makes your heart hurt,” she says, turning away. Her eyes refocus on a monstrous reel-to-reel recorder sitting dormant in the corner. Fingering the dials, she considers its presence—analog and anachronistic. “What is this thing? It’s gonna take me back in time!”

Michaelson, 29, is a 21st-century girl. She Twitters, she tumblelogs, she posts videos on YouTube of herself covering Bon Iver—and she’s in this studio, watching this string section embellish these tracks, thanks to exposure gained through MySpace and TV shows. Her rise with breakthrough album Girls and Boys over the last two years came digitally enhanced, heightened by hi-tech.
   
Much of the work on her follow-up release, Everybody, has been done in her co-producer Dan Romer's home studio, crafting the intimate feel of Girls and Boys and recent cancer-benefit album Be OK. Today, however, is about big sounds and big builds with big orchestrations. “I can always scale back,” she says.
   
Everybody—which is about a big idea—might merit the resplendence. Its 14-song arc chronicles a relationship so intense and volatile that both lovers lose themselves within it and must disengage. “It’s completely autobiographical,” Michaelson says, “snapshots of my life.” She pauses for a moment before going ahead with a chancy comparison: “Beyoncé sings songs that aren’t true or real. She had to employ an alter ego in Sasha Fierce. But I ain’t got no Jay-Z in my life. I have veggie burritos. I’m just me on stage.”

If Michaelson is no Beyoncé (her live presence has more to do with crowd harmonies and handclaps than seductive choreography), she's still plenty fierce. She writes songs at a torrential pace. She composed upward of 40 songs, then scratched nearly 30 that didn’t make Everybody’s final cut.
   
Then there’s the tricky business of the title. If the album presents such a personal account, why Everybody? Michaelson points to the title track, which announces the record’s simple truth: “Everybody needs to love / Everybody wants to be loved.” The song shares DNA with The Beatles’ “The End” and Bright Eyes’ “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And Be Loved),” and therein lies the conceit: So universal are these “matters of the heart,” as Michaelson calls them, that they can’t be claimed. Everybody is truly everybody’s. “I’m the kind of person,” she explains, “who, if I have a stain on my shirt, wants you to see it first so we can move past it.”
   
Keep listening to the record and you’ll find “Sort Of,” a lilting track about superlative love. Later, as the relationship has decayed, you’ll hear “Men of Snow,” a waltzing meditation on disappearance. As these half-made songs play over the studio’s speakers, eight people listen intently. Michaelson is the only one not wearing earth tones. Clad in pink, purple, red and orange, she stands there with her eyes closed, completing the creations in her head.