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Everybody Wins

When a songwriter opens an album with a tune called "Soldier" you'd be right to assume some half-baked war lament is going to follow. But for Ingrid Michaelson, the NY-based singer Entertainment Weekly calls the “mistress of quirk folk,” it’s a call-to-arms for the lovelorn bohemians in Alterna-Land.

Everybody, Michaelson’s prosaically titled fourth album (out today), offers 12 alternately touching and caustic glimpses into the giddy highs and desperate lows of the mating dance. Known for songs that have graced many a TV series soundtrack such as Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill, Michaelson’s a lot deeper than that connection might imply. She veers from the mellow introspection of Laura Marling to Kristin Hersh’s caterwauling intensity in the space of “Are We There Yet?” She rocks a rhythmic piano stroll through Regina Spektor territory on the made-for-Grey’s “Once Was Love.” And she keeps the wan spark of dying love alive with the closer “Maybe” that hooks its refrain around the comforting, lovesick words: “Maybe in the future / you’re gonna come back to me.”

That might seem soft-headedly romantic for a woman who compares battles of the heart to warfare. Yet it speaks directly to the appeal of Everybody that a soldier — of war, of love, of the blandness of pop music — holds tightly to the hope needed to survive another lonely day in the trenches.


Everybody is out today from Cabin 24 with Original Signal Records.