As a Black child growing up queer and trans in the Midwest, pop artist Michael Love Michael (pronouns: she/they) didn't always feel encouraged to be herself. Her emotional sensitivity, effeminate appearance and artistic expression was often shunned by those around her, so she retreated into writing and storytelling, and when she finally got a desktop computer at 16, she quietly made songs in her bedroom about her isolation, desperate for a way out of it.
As 2020 yielded a new revolution for marginalized voices, Michael, having broken free of societal restraints, is determined to use hers to call attention to issues affecting the LGBTQ community and beyond. Michael's musical influences span wildly from M.I.A., Bjork, Interpol, Nine Inch Nails and powerful female acts including Aaliyah, TLC and Madonna, which can all be heard on her acclaimed 2020 debut album,XO, and a string of singles teasing her upcoming sophomore LP,To Build Me a House.
Those singles include the incendiary “American Flag Bikini,” the delirious “Lemons,” the romantic “Richard,” the soulful, half-French pop ballad “Blue Eyed Devil,” and “Have,” a psychedelic, dream-come-true duet and collaboration with dark-folk songstress Chelsea Wolfe. All the while, Michael has established herself in the New York indie scene as a formidable live performer, playing at venues such as 3 Dollar Bill, The Bowery Electric, and Le Poisson Rouge (where in spring 2022 she staged and curated a trans-and-queer-led mini-festival called Flowers Now, the first of its kind). She has a unique visual perspective to boot: catch her playing a hooker murderess inXO’s “Mother’s Day” video, shot on-location in Hollywood; a vain housewife playing high-fashion dress-up in “6 Jaguars,” or twirling through the streets of Paris in “Richard”; writhing in a bathtub full of “Lemons” in Berlin; or dancing with a “Blue Eyed Devil.”
Building on the foundation created byXO and its critical acclaim – an album MTV says “rejects easy categorization” and what NYLON calls a “much needed perspective on the how and why of everything.” –To Build Me a House is a collection of 15 songs (13 standard, plus 2 bonus tracks) diving deeper into Michael’s psychology, and establishing a new musical identity in the process. Michael executive produced the album with Reuben Butchart, a Brooklyn-based musician and composer. Michael and Reuben recorded most of the songs over a two year period in his Brooklyn studio, with Michael starting some demos in Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin, and bringing in other writers and producers, including the aforementioned Wolfe, Mood Killer, Jesse Saint John, Venn Smyth, Natti Vogel, Blew Velvet, Sam Sparro, Medusa, and Will Shishmanian, to name a few, to round out the album’s eclectic soundscape.
However, the powerful union between Michael and Reuben informs the album’s soulful leanings, harkening back to the musical influences of Michael’s childhood. “My favorite sub-genre of music has always been R&B from the ‘90s, mostly because it was actually so left-of-center from a production and songwriting standpoint, without losing the rich emotional core that the genre demands of its practitioners,” Michael explains. “When in sessions with Reuben, we’d often pause our recording and hang out while watching videos by everyone from Sade to En Vogue.”
But beyond soul music finding its way on the record, Michael and Reuben experimented with various sounds and vocal techniques, as heard on album tracks like “Anti Trust” (a box of nails as percussion, and multilayered, dissonant vocal harmonies, for example). On songs like the “7 Psychopaths,” Michael expands her lyrical palette, writing gleefully deranged lounge-pop about the twisted humanity of serial killers and corrupt politicians, partially informed by her love of true crime. And on “Death Row/The 2nd Coming,” Michael shifts from fuzzy shoegaze to a dreamy take on reggaeton in the song’s suite-like arrangement.
The major throughline connecting the songs onTo Build Me a House, though, is the theme home and family, whether it’s the home and family that you choose, or the connections forged by nature. “Some of these songs are about specific relationships with family members I’ve had, on the surface,” Michael explains. “But there’s universal meaning in all of it. I know what it’s like to feel deeply, terribly lonely, and yet, there are ways I have found home in the people around me. Home is not always a physical place or even a structure you live in. It’s where your heart feels comfort, safety, and freedom. Sometimes you have to build that sense of home yourself.”
Album opener “House In Vermont” sets the tone for this, and by letting the listener into her solitude, home becomes a metaphor for a strong foundation. “I feel like I can breathe again,” Michael exhales in the opening lines, awash in spacious, reverbed piano lines. This track is where the album’s title is derived: “It’s okay, if it takes a lifetime at least/To build me a house that won’t fall,” Michael sings.
Of the new album, as Michael recently told V Magazine: “My stylistic and topical diversity remains, but this time, I'm focused more on things like family, spirituality, rising above the bullshit, and going deeper into my roots, and why I am who I am. The sound is largely in the pop and R&B side of things, which I didn't expect, but it's all the music I loved, that I grew up with. I'm playing guitar on several of the tracks, which I picked up at the start of 2022. The album is a beautiful, delicate, but a fierce body of work.”
For the glitter encrusted album art, Michael commissioned iconic New York painter and graphic artist, Richard Alvarez, whose portrayals of queer legends from Sylvester to Marsha P Johnson inspired her. Once the painting of Michael was complete, Brett Lindell shot the piece to make the cover art.
“It’s a huge honor to be captured in such an iconic way by an artist who has been part of many revolutions in New York, not just in art, but in the queer scene, in resistance movements, and so much more,” Michael says. “Richard is family. Brett is family. They both are people who sees legends in the making, or even unsung heroes, and he canonizes them with his portraits.”
In 2021, Michael formed a rotating live band to power up her singular sound, called the Lovers, primarily featuring the talents of Reuben Butchart (keys/co-musical direction), guitarists Will Shishmanian and Kai Prata and drummer Charlotte Kahn, and a varying cast of background singers.
Michael's lyrics and messaging hinges on the idea that the personal is one's most powerful political tool. Michael's ultimate aim, aside from helping people awaken to social ills so as to address them, is to encourage people everywhere -- who've been made to feel like who they are isn’t enough -- to unlock their voices and raise them to the rafters.
