Music Review – Ingrid Michaelson’s Lights Out

Ingrid Michaelson’s Lights Out dropped on Tuesday. I was nervous about this album after hearing the first single, “Girls Chase Boys,” a song that in a lot of ways exacerbated my largest problem with Michaelson’s output to date: namely, her penchant for combining interesting music with tepid lyrics.


Most pop music that you listen to relies heavily on songwriters and producers, relegating the role of the featured artists to performance (not totally dissimilar to an actor whose lines come from a screenwriter and whose tableau is set by a director), Michaelson is nearly always credited as both writer and composer of her tracks. For much of her career this auteurist sensibility was admirable in theory and suspect in practice. From the first track of 2007’s Girls and Boys (“Die Alone”) through 2012’s Human Again, Michaelson’s lyrical work has been hugely hit or miss, often within the same song. It was sometimes so bad that it was distracting. In the opening lines of “Die Alone,” for instance, Michaelson tells us that she “woke up this morning / a funny taste in my head / spackled some butter / over my whole grain bread / something tastes different / maybe it’s my tongue.” These lines paint the picture of a ridiculous hipster sensibility that believes that:

1. There is something unique about waking up and feeling weird, something so unique that it should be chronicled.
2. Whole grain bread is, in some numinous way, more poetic (perhaps because of its whole-grained authenticity) than any other type of bread.
3. A tongue tasting itself just ties the whole world of perception in knots.
4. Evocative writing lies in action verbs (spackle that butter!).

It is hardly surprising, given this brand of lyricism that Michaelson’s big breaks came from being the closing music for shows like Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, and One Tree Hill.

At the same time, Michaelson is a luminous musical talent with an ear for interesting rhythms. At various points in her catalogue you can hear a rhythmic heritage with ancestors as diverse as Bill Monroe (the mandolin genius who was instrumental in the creation of bluegrass) and America (no, really, listen to “Soldier” and then listen to “Tin Man” and tell me these aren’t musical cousins). She is also a very talented melodic composer, when she moves into up tempo numbers, like her hit, “Be Okay,” the music really sticks with you. In a lot of ways her composing has been forced to dig itself out of holes dug by her poetry [1].

I thought we were in for more of the same when I listened to “Girls Chase Boys.” We weren’t. The album’s opening track, “Home,” begins with a long tuning note on strings that draws the other instruments into harmony. It is the perfect metaphor for this album. The music surges, is almost irresistible in its inventiveness and interest, and for the first time in her career the lyrics are consistently above average. You can hear flecks of Michaelson’s previously uneven poetic voice here, but for the first time they are brought under confident control. This is the album of a realized artist, who, for the first time, has gained enough mastery of the technical components of her craft to deliver a fully realized artistic product. This record makes me so glad that she writes and composes her own music. A must listen.

Rating: 3.75/4

[1] I imagine this like an NBA team with a great defense and a terrible offense, who, if they could only score at even an average weight, would win 70 games. If Michaelson’s poetry were consistently average the strength of her music would make her an elite talent.

 This content appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll