"Michaela Anne is an inspiring artist everyone should check out."
— Anne Powers, NPR MUSIC
In a dim green room backstage on tour in the UK, Michaela Anne pressed record on her phone and captured what would become the chorus to her new single, If Your Body Fails You — her first song in two years. It was the spark that broke a long silence, a stretch when songwriting had felt impossibly far away.
The silence began when Michaela became a mom, just as her own mother suffered a life-altering stroke. Bearing witness to her mother’s loss—of mobility, of independence, of being treated as fully herself—Michaela became desperate to understand unconditional love, for herself and for those around her. “I want to resist the idea that we must be preserved. If we’re lucky to be here long enough, our bodies will fail us, and only in our deep devotion to ourselves and each other will we survive.” If Your Body Fails You carries that tenderness: a recognition that we will change, and that love must deepen to hold all of it.
Her forthcoming album, These Are The Days, is the first music of her career that she fully owns. No longer willing to be part of a system that denied her ownership of her work, Michaela recorded the album at her home studio — a backyard sanctuary hand-built by her husband, producer Aaron Shafer Haiss, and his father. It marks her debut release on her own label, Georgia June Records.
Born into a military family that moved frequently, Michaela Anne first drew national attention with her 2014 debut Ease My Mind, praised by The New York Times for its “plain-spoken songs of romantic regret and small-town longing.” After a move from Brooklyn to Nashville, she followed with 2016’s Bright Lights and the Fame, earning comparisons in Rolling Stone to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.
Her 2019 Yep Roc debut Desert Dove marked a true breakthrough. Praised by outlets from Billboard and USA Today to NPR, which called its lead single “one of those moody, breathtaking, stop-you-in-your-tracks songs,” the album landed her on major festival stages from Bonnaroo to XPoNential.
These Are The Days reconnects with her rock roots, moving away from classic country toward something both raw and expansive. With players who have shared the stage with Miranda Lambert, Tyler Childers, and Post Malone, the record is textured, vibrant, and deeply human. Its songs nod to the clarity of Kathleen Edwards, the storytelling of Jackson Browne, the grit of Lucinda Williams, and the lush openness of The War on Drugs, while maintaining the pop accessibility of Kacey Musgraves.
If Michaela’s earlier records searched for satisfaction in the external world, These Are The Days turns the gaze inward. It is a re-grounding of values, an honest reckoning with both light and shadow.
“The humdrum is holy,” she sings on the title track, reminding us that the small moments — often overlooked — are what make a life. There’s no escapism here, no gloss. The mundane becomes expansive; the ordinary, sacred.
It is, ultimately, a coming-of-age record written in her thirties — a recognition that there is no love without grief, and that growing up means learning to hold both.