Michaela Anne
When I catch up with Nashville singer-songwriter Michaela Anne, she is handling shit. There is a pallet of records with her name on it coming — her newest album These Are the Days, which she’ll self-release Friday on her Georgia June label — and she needs to find space for them in her house. It’s one of those logistical details that make her new life as an independent artist after a decade with a record deal a little more complicated but a lot more satisfying.
“[The shipping company] called and they’re like, ‘Can a semi truck fit at your property?’” says Michaela Anne. “And I’m like, ‘No.’ With the chaos of having a 1-year-old and a 4-year-old, it’s really hectic, but also really fun. The learning curve has just been, like, the managing of all of the things — just the workload, and some of the decisions.
“If you have a label, they’re handling the printing of the physical merch and the storage. They have an in-house designer, and they’re paying all the bills — which is going back on your account, but you’re not seeing all the numbers.”
Look at the cover of These Are the Days and you notice a moment of perfect stillness in the photo of Michaela Anne nursing her youngest baby, a kind of take on a Madonna and Child. The image captures mother and baby amid the blur of life, in a moment of peace ground from the friction between patience and the need to plan. It’s beautiful, but the longer you think about it the more you feel the pull of your own to-do list.
That restlessness, that need to do the thing, runs through These Are the Days, even when Michaela Anne is trying to be in the moment. It makes the album feel warm and lived-in, confident and mature. The hooks have heft, the verses have depth, the songs feel as comfortable and supportive as an old couch after a long day of chasing rugrats.
“It had taken me a long time to get ready to record,” she says. “I didn’t write songs for two full years. Two years is the longest I’ve ever gone without writing. … It just upended my sense of self as a musician, as a writer. I wasn’t touring the way that I had been because of the pandemic, because I became a mother, because my mother had a stroke.
“I just had no solid ground. And I really questioned, like, ‘Wow, my life took a big turn and I don’t know how to grapple with this.’ And so I didn’t write for two years — I just couldn’t. These songs were what came when I finally started writing again. And almost all of them are co-writes because I really leaned on my community to help kind of like bring me back to myself.”
Her community, it should be noted, is made up of absolutely bonkers-good musicians. With her husband Aaron Shafer-Haiss at the board (and behind the drum kit) in their backyard studio, she worked with guitarists including Seth Taylor, Ethan Ballinger and John McNally; bassist Owen Biddle; and keys player Jimmy Matt Rowland. They create a dynamic that fluctuates between beer-joint fuzz tones and cleaned-up post-collegiate folk-rock. On the title track and the single “If Your Body Fails You,” the band sits deep in the pocket along with the sticks and stones, flowers and bones that allow Michaela Anne to ask big questions and ponder serious answers.
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“Nashville is such a co-writing town, but I didn’t become a songwriter here,” says Michaela Anne. She co-wrote many of the songs on the new LP with friend and fellow songsmith Zach Berkman. “So I kind of always still had in my head, like, ‘Oh, you prove yourself by writing alone.’ We knew that we were writing songs that were for my record or about my life, and it just kind of helped put the pieces all back together and regain my confidence.”
Her community extends well beyond the studio door. That pallet of records wouldn’t be possible without the support of her fans and a successful Kickstarter. The gratitude and appreciation in her voice is audible through the whole conversation, but there’s an extra little bit of awe there when she talks about her fan support. Which makes sense: Being able to make the music you love with the people you love is a rare opportunity and not one to be taken lightly. The result is an album that finds an artist making music that is as joyful as it is deeply relatable.
“Aaron and I have been together 20 years. I started out wide-eyed: Anything’s possible, we can do all this stuff. And then life hit me in a really hard way, and I stopped believing in all of that, and it got pretty dark. Aaron was there to pick it up and be like, ‘No, I still see this. Let’s go. We’ve got a whole new story to keep writing.’”
