Vocalist, guitarist, pianist, singer, and songwriter Michelle Lynn has been blending elements of calypso, gospel, blues, reggae, and alternative rock into an idiosyncratic style of New Age Folk that is uniquely hers since 2005, when her musical journey intuitively began in the rolling valleys of the Driftless Region in the Upper Midwest. With literate, transformative lyrics and a luminous, exquisitely quirky voice, Michelle’s music connects the personal with the universal and the spiritual with the profane by confronting broader themes such as sustainability, feminism, dreams, religion, love, and the global economy through the various archetypes she finds in and around her.
Growing up on a farm in rural NE Iowa, Michelle’s borderline obsessive interest with words and writing was evident from an early age. An avid reader, her literary influences (Whitman, Ginsberg, Thoreau, etc.) have had an immense impact on her “not big words, just a lot of words†style of writing. She picked up the guitar out of impulse at age seventeen and with the early instruction of veteran guitarist David Reed; she quickly found the process of laying words over sounds to be incredibly cathartic.
Her debut album, Jump Roping in Chains, along with her steady performance schedule, quickly established her a reputation as a reliably entertaining solo artist. NE Iowa arts monthly Tapestry Magazine described the album as “A fearless collection of songs that strips away any pretension…†Her music gained the attention of filmmaker and Okoboji, IA native Becky Smith, who cast Michelle as a musician independent film 16 to Life. Her music has been played on independent radio stations throughout Iowa and she has regularly been invited to perform on several local music radio programs (104.7 KVIK, 100.5 KDEC, KUNI 90.9 FM).
Michelle Lynn's second album Hospital Radio was released in the spring of 2008 to a warm local response. La Crosse, WI arts weekly Second Supper proclaimed that “Michelle Lynn blew us away at this past summer’s Culture Shock festival…†and Decorah’s Inspire(d) Magazine was “…impressed by the depth and experience of her lyricsâ€. Hospital Radio had Michelle utilizing piano & backing musicians for the first time; the broader sound, along with her signature, unyielding stream-of-consciousness approach, attracted an more varied audience and led to another steady string local and regional gigs.
Michelle has recently emerged from a yearlong sabbatical in Austin, TX with a visionary new album entitled Pre-Echoes for the Postmodern. The songs tell the story of a sensitive soul willfully surrendering to the chaotically destructive process that breeds creation in the thin line between light and dark. The result is her most conceptually unified, lyrically compelling, and sonically diverse album to date.
Pre-Echoes for the Postmodern rises to new heights on the wings of lines like: “A life sentence to a lovely déjà vu. At least I have you caught in my feedback loop†(from the intricately arranged Feedback); "In the mean time, in the in between time, may you find time is now" (from the Latin-tinged Ouroboros); “Death by fear is killing my spirit here. With storms ahead, suddenly it's clear: Tomorrow still comes around here.†(from Death by Fear, an alt-rock collaboration with producer Brahman Shaman).
The snake will turn on its head again for a Pre-Echoes Tour in the spring of 2010 that will bring Michelle back to the diverse places and faces that are such an integral part of of an album she sees as an intensely inspirational outer representation of her own inner manifestation. Although, she is quick to point out the effect of such a cyclical creative process saying with her tongue firmly in cheek that, “my life is now providing my muse, so it's almost like my waste is providing my food."
