Noelle Rose Photo
“If only you knew what was in front of you / Would you do the things you wanted to?” Michaela Anne was on a beach in Morocco when those lines came to her, the exact moment of inspiration captured indelibly in a photograph that now graces the cover of her gorgeous and aching new album, Oh To Be That Free. At the time, Michaela had no way of knowing what lay ahead—sobriety, pregnancy, a global pandemic, the hemorrhagic stroke that would nearly kill her mother—but listening back in the warm glow of hindsight, it’s clear that the future was already weighing heavily on her mind.
“It’s kind of surreal the way this record turned out to be exactly what I needed to hear when I was at my lowest,” she reflects. "These songs became healers, almost as if I’d written them as letters to my future self.”
For a searcher like Michaela, sitting still was no easy task. Born and raised in a military family that relocated often, she first began garnering national attention with the 2014 release of Ease My Mind, an old-school country collection hailed by The New York Times for its “plain-spoken songs of romantic regret and small-town longing.” After a move from Brooklyn to Nashville, Michaela followed it up in 2016 with the similarly lauded Bright Lights and the Fame, which prompted Rolling Stone to compare her to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. However, it was Desert Dove, Michaela’s 2019 Yep Roc debut, that truly marked her critical and commercial breakthrough, landing her festival invitations everywhere from Bonnaroo to XPoNential alongside praise from Billboard, USA Today,
Michaela was in the midst of her first trimester while she recordedOh To Be That Free, completely unaware at the time that she would spend the entire second half of her pregnancy at a hospital bedside in Michigan, where she would devote herself to caring for her mother as she recovered from a debilitating stroke.
“We were in the process of mixing the album when I got the call, so I was living and breathing the songs at the time,” Michaela says. “I’d bring my guitar to the hospital and play them over and over for my mom and for the baby growing inside of me, just letting the lyrics sink into my consciousness. The songs became my friends, my teachers, and they revealed even deeper lessons and meaning as I was grappling with life and loss in an entirely new and raw way.”
True love isn’t for faint of heart. But if you only knew what was in front of you, would you choose to live any other way?
Oh To Be That Free follows Michaela’s 2019 Yep Roc debut, Desert Dove. The albums have helped her land festival invitations everywhere from Bonnaroo to XPoNential alongside praise from Billboard, USA Today, The Associated Press, Paste, and more. The World Café raved that “Michaela Anne’s voice shines like a beacon,” while NPR hailed her “stunning vocals,” and Rolling Stone named the album one of the year’s best country and Americana releases.