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XPN Welcomes Mat Kearney & Ingrid Michaelson

Presented by Electric Factory at Electric Factory

March 19, 2010

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From MatKearney.com:

When you record the type of smart, catchy songs Mat Kearney cut for his 2006 album Nothing Left to Lose, you end up spending a lot of time on the road. And after that album’s title track throttled up the charts, that’s exactly what Kearney did. Three years later, he returns with City of Black & White, an album informed by the traveling, performing and adventuring the Oregon-born, Nashville-based singer did while supporting his breakthrough album. An open-hearted album of self-discovery, City of Black & White is a chronicle of the people he met and missed during that journey. Musically, it’s an upping of the ante, laced with hooks and rhythms that are meant to sneak up on you quietly and quickly, en route to winning your love.

From AllMusic.com:

With her piano-fueled songwriting, witty wordplay, and slight vocal vibrato, Ingrid Michaelson carries the tradition of the female singer/songwriter into the 21st century. Befitting a musician of the digital age, Michaelson first gained wide exposure through spots on TV soundtracks, including Grey's Anatomy and One Tree Hill. Born and raised on New York's Staten Island to an artist mother and classical composer father, she began exploring music through piano lessons at the age of four. After college, she toured with a national theater troupe and spent her free time writing songs, later compiling them into an online-distributed recording entitled Slow the Rain.

Michaelson blazed her own trail by independently issuing her proper debut, the engaging Girls and Boys, in 2006; following the inclusion of her music in several episodes of Grey's Anatomy, she then released a remastered version of the album on her own Cabin 24 Records in January 2007. Three months later, she won a national songwriting contest sponsored by Mountain Stage, a radio program produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed worldwide. "The Way I Am" was then picked up by Old Navy, who used it to soundtrack one of their clothing commercials, and Michaelson began making headlines as one of the country's most promising independent artists. A benefit project comprised of live recordings, new songs, and rarities, Be OK was released in 2008. Michaelson joined the Hotel Cafe Tour that fall in support of the album, whose proceeds went toward cancer research, and later toured Europe alongside Jason Mraz.

For her "proper" follow-up to Girls and Boys, Ingrid Michaelson retreated to a Manhattan studio alongside producer Dan Romer. 40 newly composed songs were whittled down to a total of 12, with more emphasis being paid to the songwriter's peppier material. Featuring a string section on several songs, 2009's Everybody proved to be Michaelson's most expansive, confident effort to date, and she followed its release with another cross-country fall tour.