A Confession.

It is well-known amongst those who have spoken to me for more than 10 minutes that I have very...hmm... particular tastes. Most notably, anyone who has known me in the period from 1998 through 2004 would have been subjected to my violent fanhood of Björk. (The 9 posters remain in my hands but have been reluctantly muzzled into a cardboard cylinder.) Anyone who has paid closer attention has also noticed that my tastes in movies also followed strange patterns encompassing a wide mix of romantic comedies, the movie Angus, and sitcoms.

In short, despite the fact that I do enjoy many works of music and art that are "genuinely" good, I also have a taste for things that tend to be more guilty pleasure-ish and/or less masculine. And I've never really been very embarassed by it.

But now I've been very regularly following and listening to one artist who I have not really discussed openly because it actually seems to cross the acceptability boundary so far that I manage to feel a little weird about it. Her name is Ingrid Michaelson, and she's basically a lone sorta-hippie chick whose rise to fame began with an Old Navy advertisement, and culminated with inclusion into several Grey's Anatomy episodes. I actually got her album when M. sent me a DVD with like 50 folders of her music, and she happened to be one of them.

I think what makes this musical obsession of mine so embarassing is a combination of factors. First, her music has been featured on Grey's Anatomy, One Tree Hill, The Real World, and The House Bunny (I am partially redeemed by the fact that I have seen NONE of these shows.) Second, she looks like this.(Yumm...look at that burger.) Third, and most dangerously and why I love her music the most...is that she is just a girl singing her heart out. She's not wry and she doesn't have a hip sense of irony or detachment. She just sings love songs. Or life songs. Or heartbreak songs. And her lyrics can tend towards the embarassing in print, but in her songs they can break your heart. Her melodies don't veer into experimentation and tend to stay in the major scales. She knows exactly what she's doing, and her songs are simple: almost entirely bullshit free (musically at least). She's the best of chick-folk-pop-rock. And yes, she has a very very pop sensibility.

The reason I thought to comment on her music, as opposed to any others, is that I just saw her in concert two nights in a row. First, I saw her first show of her tour in Staten Island on Thursday (a place I am never going back to), and then immediately went to Boston and saw her again on Friday, where I finally folded and bought a T-shirt with a skull and crossbones with pink hearts for eyes. And because her live performances were sublime, spine-tingling, hilarious, charming, gorgeously performed, and among the most pleasurable concerts I've ever attended in my life...I figured I'd go ahead and confess my fanhood.

In any case...if you are someone who has been pretty much on board with me for all of my embarassing music and movie and book choices...and love them for the same reasons I do...then I suggest you give her a looky-look. If you don't, and generally spend a large part of our conversations asking how my vagine is feeling, and making comments like "stop being such a woman" and/or "you have terrible taste" then, uh...move along.

P.S. I start work tomorrow.