New York Pop Collective Michelle Muses Over Meals And In Google Docs

“Michelle loves some Guy Fieri.”


This is one of the initial things mentioned on a Zoom call with the six members of Michelle, a New York City-based pop order. To clarify, no one in the musical group is actually named Michelle. Nevertheless as Sofia D’Angelo, a vocalist and songwriter, points out, their collective affinity for the Mayor of Flavortown is one element that unites them. “One of my main go to pieces of food journalism is the review of his restaurant that's just, like, a series of questions,” she admits, sitting in front of a huge digital backdrop of Fieri himself clad in a flame shirt. “Have you read that?”


The resonance goes deeper than obvious meme status and the general Fierification of the world wide web. All six members — vocalists/writers D’Angelo, Emma Lee, Jamee Lockard, and Layla Ku; producers/instrumentalists Julian Kaufman and Charlie Kilgore — started creating music for Michelle separately, before they’d ever met in person altogether. Shortly soon after they completed a full LP in 2018, they finally gathered to start touring to support it. To cut through that beginning awkwardness around getting to know each other, they employed a popular tradition used through centuries, from Jesus and his disciples all of the way to the patrons of Mac & Ernie's Roadside Eatery in Texas on an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. They shared a good meal.


“A key component of tour life and finding time to settle and take a little bit respite from the hectic, crazy nature of being social and performing nonstop,” Ku says, “was the meals we would eat on tour. Even if it's just McDonald's in the van, we're still all in one place doing one thing.”


Fittingly, the title of Michelle’s new album, out today (March 4), brims with culinary inspiration. After Dinner We Talk Dreams intelligently pushes the group’s vocalists to the front of its R&B-inspired, keyboard-heavy dance-pop, letting each singer live in her respective musical space. However not for long. On standout single “Mess U Made,” gorgeous harmonies arrive on each chorus as musical support, making a mesmerizing wall-of-sound vocal effect. The bread has been damaged. The collective spirit is strong.


That’s immediately obvious in the group’s homespun music video for “Pose,” where all six make the New York subway system their playground (as choreographed by Lee). Intimate close-ups of pirouettes and dizzying train shots make the visual hum with electricity and motion. The takeaway is that this is a group — one whose vivacity matches its residence city. In press photographs, music videos, and on social media, all six members are represented similarly. Nevertheless their starting was much less defined.


The comparatively lo-fi debut Michelle project, 2018’s Heatwave, was place on Earth from separate recording sessions; one member dreamed up and sang an idea, and Kaufman and Kilgore helped execute the vision. Michelle, as a concept, was still tenuous. Kilgore met Ku in high school and Lockard in college, and Ku and D’Angelo connected in the New York music scene. General creativity (and being companions of companions) eventually brought each person together.


“It was very much like just capturing a moment,” Kilgore says. “We did a number of takes in Julian's bedroom with that mic after we wrote it. Heatwave just seemed really like a snapshot of the moment in time that we made it.”


That moment also called for them to pick a name for this “summer project,” as Lockard says the sort imagined it at the time. “​​The story we tell is that we just wanted to name ourselves immediately after a singular femme name, like all of the icons: Brandy and Beyoncé and Rihanna and Adele.”


The gag, D’Angelo points out, is that there’s no singular femme voice in the group.​​ They are one. They are Michelle. “It was either that or Gertrude,” she says.


To support Heatwave’s release, Michelle lined up some live dates. To perform, they first had to meet in person. They linked up for the opening time in a cafeteria at Bard College ahead of a gig there; Kaufman was still going to school in Ohio, so he couldn’t make it. Although the vibe was bubbly among the five. “I had seen photographs of each person on the Michelle Instagram, and I knew who wrote what song, however it's sort of like meeting your preference artists for the initial time,” D’Angelo says. “But these are people that you worked on the same project with.”


That first concert ended with a group singalong of “Stuck on U,” still one of their most-streamed tracks. Kilgore calls it a defining juncture for Michelle. “I was also going to mention that exact moment, Charlie,” Lockard says, several minutes immediately after finishing a banana. “So it was funny to hear you mention it.”


They’ve toured heavily around North America since then, first for Gus Dapperton and Arlo Parks, and will join Mitski later this month. Lee says the contradictions onstage between that Bard show and current performances are stark. They’ve coordinated some dance moves. They know how to support their mates. They’re with each other, even any time they’re not actively singing or performing on each and every song.


“Part of that was just, OK, how do we split up all of the harmonies and split up all of the songs so that it's equitable and feels like we can collectively share this vision with everybody else?” She says. Lockard says their stage presence has “pockets synchronicity” with a lot of room for unscripted and unrehearsed moments. “It gives us the space where we sort of get to freestyle and riff off of each other.”


She likens the group’s developments to “shifting back and forth between Michelle on a big-umbrella scale versus Michelle, the little people who are holding up the umbrella.”


Capturing all of these little people for After Dinner We Talk Dreams proved to be a feat, so Kaufman sought a warmer sound to unite the disparate voices in the order. “We had access to several different vintage mics from the 1960s and ‘70s, which let's dial in the correct frequency response per singer, per song to prepare ensure that every voice had pocket along with a cut, no matter what track we were on,” he says. The gliding harmonies on songs like “50-50” and “No Signal,” as a result, could light up an entire city block. Each track captures the strength of a specific member or two; the ambition for the others is to support it.


Though its illustrated cover art suggests moony conversations lingering immediately after a friendly potluck, After Dinner We Talk Dreams was chosen as a title to resemble both escape and communal love. The Michelle members used a Google Doc to workshop potential album names, and Lee extracted the line from its closer, “My Friends,” as a way to encapsulate all 14 songs (the full lyric: “After dinner we talk dreams / Like dancing and leaving the city / Nevertheless where I go I'll take you with me”).


“When I wrote that line, I was thinking more about living at house. Right after dinner, I would leave residence and I would meet my companions in the park, you know?” Lee says. “That's once it's like, oh, right now I can think of all these things that are separate from residence, or these dreams and these fantasies. However it certainly has become significant in the particular group.”


Traveling with each other in a van and traversing the continent, furthermore to performing with each other onstage, “redefines intimacy,” as Ku puts it. “You have to learn how to engage in a way where you're sustaining your sense of self and your sense of calm and sanity, yet also being aware and acknowledging the others around you.”


The Michelle Instagram account reflects the members’ commitment to sustaining each of their own selves in a joint musical enterprise. Videos of D’Angelo singing The 1975, Lockard covering Chris Stapleton, and Ku strumming John Prine mingle next to sort shots and photo dumps. That independence comes in handy as soon as it’s time to prepare big collective decisions, like filming a live take of “Mess U Made” to add added “heat and weight” that, in Ku’s words, were missing from the recorded version.


“Layla gave me and Charlie a phone call basically saying, ‘Damn, this does not go as hard as I remember it going,’” Kaufman recalls. “‘You guys gotta do something on this. Like, this isn't cutting the mustard.’” At this, Ku obviously drops a “shoutout mustard” in the Zoom chat. “Shout out to mustard, yeah,” Kaufman says. “The ‘tard.”


Categorize energy is what powers Michelle. Food, obviously, sustains that energy in the initial place. And the restless buzz of their residence city prolongs that power. “[Food is] perhaps the new seventh member of Michelle,” Ku says, before backtracking. “Or eighth member — since New York is the seventh.”