Girls and Boys

I was raised on singer-songwriters of the 60's and 70s'. When the 80's rolled around I left popular music for good. Hearing the stuff my kids were listening to lately didn't change my mind. Then I heard Ingrid Michaelson's work on a commercial, dug around and found that the great singer-songwriters haven't gone away after all. I bought the CD and enjoy it more each time I listen to it.

An interesting style with many catchy rhythms and melodies. She can get a bit repetitive at times, but overall, still very nice and refreshing.

This was a very hyped CD and for me with my middle of the road taste, found it to be the worse CD I have purchased, in addition to Blue Raincoat by Jennifer Warrens. After The Hunter with Jennifer Warnnes came out, Jennifer could have sold me an Edsel. What is her game plan? On Michaelson's album girls and boys I did like "The Way I Am". I do have a machine that will let me splice tracks together, so maybe I can salvage one song from the miserable album.

Blah Blah Blah, my wife got this for one of her friends that has questionable taste in music. This qualifies as the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR of manufactured homogenized pap. It is so lame it even has a sticker on it that says as heard at Old Navy and on Greys Anatomy, as if that is a good thing!
I would recommend this for those that truly have no taste and like to be told what they should like.

Ingrid Mishaelson has been, as noted above, featured in Old Navy Commercials, and those emotionally drenched scenes on Grey's Anatomy and One Tree Hill. The New York based artist has a rather quirky feel to her music and on ocassions the festive lilt of the campfire chanteuse. Her songs are suffused by a poetic tension, and the lyricism is always smart and intuitive. She deftly applies caesuras, alliterations and the whole gamut of poetic devices. She was born in an artistic family, her dad Carl, a composer and her mom, Elizabeth Egbert, is the Director of the Staten Island Museum. Her trepidation and soulful plaintive dramatizations are offset by a brilliant wit that nourishes the strife with elusive bounds of genius. She sounds like Regina Spektor without the grit, and is as melodious as Bjork without the shrills of madness. Her songs lead a touted dalliance that gives these age old topics of love, love unrequieted, and broken hearts, an emtional cadance that betrays a sense of humor and tentalizes the listener by informing the conscience of the music with a dash of brio, enough to depict self-pity as both loathsome and sympathetic. This is best exemplified in her songs "Corner of Your Heart" and "Glass", the latter opaquely muddles the speaker who admits that "I see through you...as you see through me, as if invisible." However in other titles such as the more illustrious "The Way I Am" and "Die Alone" she surrenders her acts to a love that is sufficient and fulfilling. Her personae are vivid and colorful, startling and impregnated by dissimulating logic and orphaned sentimentality, which is not to say that this is a depressing CD. On the contrary it has an abundance of tracks that feature a joyous attitude, and her vocal prowess is used to pitch perfect adumbrations to cull such motifs with as much success as the more somber ones.
Her sensibility is tested somewhat in the 12th, and hidden track, "Far Away" where while performing similar antics to her description of the fragile psychological surrender evinced in, for example, "December Baby" where the speaker wishes to crawl back into her mother's womb, while in "Far Away" she diverts herself in a tuneful, sportive cynicism affected by the twang of country music. To what extent she succeeds is for you to decide, but it was recorded all in good fun. The emotional depth of the lyrics, the dramatization of each chracterization, the melodious bravado of the vocalizations and the instrumental rhythmic glaze is a sampling to entertain and astound alike. However the social maturity of a Natalie Merchant is still in its punk stage and the promise hinted in this compilation lends itself to appreciating a mind set for engaged art. Here the individual speaks but the social commentary is not far behind. All in all this is a virtuoso performance that delineates the straits of the melancholy stagnation, of lovers' neurosis and plaintive wistfulness while nourishing an inner void that is reactionary and quirky.
Awesome. The 2005 self-released debut, "Slow the Rain" had introduced us to a singer of an artistic flair whose intangibles are commercial and popular, however defined by a poet's lissome language. In her follow-up she assures us that the great marketing she has been favored by is not the sole force behind a artist we ask many more brilliant tunes from. Not since Jewel and , Natalie Merchant, Jill Sobule and Sarah McLaughlin have we seen such intimate rapport with the music, while being implicated by such a commercial influx. On the verge of 30 she is ready for more than just a breakthrough, she will give us pearls of wisdom to grow with.