Human Behaviour

Ingrid Michaelson was very possibly the only person on the planet who had never heard of Cheryl Cole when representatives of the Geordie pop maven and serial loser in love got in touch.

“It was suggested that one of my tracks would be a good fit for her,” says the petite Staten Island singer, laughingly dryly. “So my song ‘Parachute’ ended up being one of her first solo singles. She was this huge star and I had no idea who she was.”
Michaelson thought nothing of it until, on a tour of the UK, she switched on the television one night.
“It was the height of all the stuff in the papers about her personal life,” the 30-year-old continues. “And whenever she came up on the news, my song was playing in the background. It was surreal. There was this huge story – and I was a little part of it.”
It’s exactly the sort of unlikely twist that has come to define Michaelson’s career. At every stage, serendipity has seemed to raise its head. Her current hit single ‘Blood Brothers’, for instance, was inspired by a random act of thoughtlessness at a New York recording studio, around the corner from Times Square.
“It’s called Avatar and is one of the last old school places in Manhattan, where there’s room for a whole big band. We were recording on the second floor and you had to go upstairs to use the bathrooms. Tony Bennett was up there, working with Aretha Franklin. It was so incredibly hot – she requests the air-conditioning be turned off because it helps with her singing. So all these bigwigs were in there and I checked it out and as I was walking away some guy ran into me and I spilled tea all over myself. It filled me with rage.”
She sat down to write a song that channeled her fury and, without intending to, ended up composing a paean to universal brotherhood, a tune that asks “Why can’t we all get along?”
“It’s a little hokey and a little cheesy,” she admits. “I’m a little of all of those things. However, I think a lot of people feel the way I do. Nowadays everyone is in a rush. When someone stands up on the subway to give a pregnant woman their seat, I’m amazed. So that’s where it came from – me being angry on a hot day in New York.”
Michaelson sold out Whelan’s in Dublin the other month while her new album, Human Again, has already been a hit in America. At the same time, she’s mightily conflicted about how she got here. Rather than breaking through on radio or being championed in the press, she owes her early success to the support of TV shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and a commercial for the Old Navy clothing chain, which featured her song ‘The Way I Am’. It’s a cute tune – though not, she insists, representative of her work.
“It was this little tune that I never thought anyone would ever hear. It wasn’t a favourite – though that’s always the way it goes.”
On Human Again she tries to alter the perception that she’s a kooky underdog, forever strumming her ukelele and mouthing ditzy lyrics.
“The world sees the tip of the iceberg,” Michaelson concludes. “I want to show the full iceberg. On this record I intentionally didn’t do, you know, the ‘little ditties’. It isn’t that I don’t want to license my music. But I want to put my best foot forward and show there’s another side to me. Of course, I shouldn’t complain too much. If it wasn’t for that one little ditty, I wouldn’t be sitting here, talking to you.”