Breaking Artist: Ingrid Michaelson

Who: Staten Island, New York singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson got her big break when "Keep Breathing" was discovered on MySpace and used during a pivotal moment of the Grey's Anatomy season finale. The twenty-seven-year-old also scored an Old Navy commercial with "The Way I Am," helping to rocket her second LP Girls and Boys to the top of both Billboard's Heatseekers and Alternative New Artist charts -- despite the fact that she has never signed to a label.

Sounds Like: Feist with a bit of Regina Spektor's quirk. On Girls and Boys, Michaelson tap-dances between piano-based ballads with pristine vocals and a few attitude-heavy guitar-centric tracks that show off her more rockin' side.

Three Things You Should Know:
1. After Old Navy ran with "The Way I Am," Michaelson started a forum on her MySpace to open discussion on selling out vs. succeeding. She says it's difficult for developing artists to turn down big breaks but, "If a big bad corporation comes up to me and wants me to be their mascot hopefully I'll be able to do my research and do what I know in my heart to be the right thing."
2. Girls and Boys is about (surprise) relationships. "I sing about those kinds of issues but in very boiled down simple terms," she says. "I listen to every kind of music and I have no idea what some people are talking about, but I still enjoy it. I want to say a lot with as few words as possible."
3. After being raised on pop-free diet of folk, classical music and the Beatles, Michaelson took to show tunes as a kid. "My parents put me in theater when I was nine. I did Guys and Dolls, a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan, Into the Woods," she says, adding that she studied musical theater in college but is actively trying to move away from such theatrics in her newer songs.

Get It: Girls and Boys was re-released in September and is in stores and available on iTunes.

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter