MICHELLE is a creative powerhouse
IMAGE COURTESY OF MICHELLE
By Yas Akdag MUSIC EDITOR
“Kick-ass bangers.” In three words, that’s how Julian Kaufman of New York City-based collective MICHELLE would describe their music, which blurs the lines between pop, R&B, funk and everything in between. In paying tribute to their hometown and the way it’s shaped their lives, MICHELLE skips across various sonic palettes to produce two glittering albums — “HEATWAVE” and “AFTER DINNER WE TALK DREAMS” — the latter of which released on March 4. New York City runs in MICHELLE’s veins. The band’s members — Sofia D’Angelo, Julian Kaufman, Charlie Kilgore, Layla Ku, Emma Lee and Jamee Lockard — are native New Yorkers who all “took [their] first steps” in the city, as D’Angelo put it. The whole group contributes to the songwriting process, acting as a collective, with Kaufman and Kilgore focusing on the programming while D’Angelo, Ku, Lee and Lockard sing. Arguably, MICHELLE wouldn’t even be MICHELLE without New York. The group first got together to record “HEATWAVE,” an album about growing up in the city. Having met through mutual friends in high school, Kaufman and Kilgore reached out to singer-songwriters they knew through the New York teen music scene, recruiting D’Angelo, Lee, Lockard and Ku for the project. Thus, MICHELLE was formed, even if the group didn’t know until later quite what that meant. “Being the singer-songwriters, [we] went in on different days to write and record our songs,” Lockard said. “So we actually weren’t all together for the first time until our first concert at Bard College, which was a couple months after the album [‘HEATWAVE’] had already come out.” The city also inspired MICHELLE’s goals as a collective, which originally
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bloomed from the group’s shared love of all things music, art and New York. “That kind of shared love for music and art and our city really guided us through our first record and continued to guide us through the making of ‘AFTER DINNER WE TALK DREAMS,’” D’Angelo said. I was curious as to how MICHELLE’s mission had evolved since “HEATWAVE,” but D’Angelo beat me to the question. “I think now the mission is just seeing how far we can go with this and how we can explore our creativity in new ways, with all these new resources that we now have access to and all the lessons that we’ve learned — from making ‘HEATWAVE’ in two weeks to ‘AFTER DINNER WE TALK DREAMS’ in two, three years; [from] making music videos with full crews to music videos with no crew at all,” she said. The group defines themselves as a collective because of how much they do by themselves — from merchandise to artwork — demonstrating that MICHELLE is more than just a music project. “The sweater that Jamee’s wearing right now, Layla designed,” D’Angelo said, adding that Lee designs all of the collective’s artwork, including their latest album cover. “The fact we get to explore all of our artistic love in this one entity is really special.” The group’s creativity and progress is no better exemplified than in their latest single, “POSE.” Over a pulsating, kick-heavy beat and ’70s-inspired synths, MICHELLE sings, “Pose one, pose two, pose next to me.” The song is the perfect dance track. It’s hard to imagine it being anything else, though it apparently started out slower. When Kaufman and Kilgore received feedback that “POSE” had potential for a dance song, they upped the production ante.
