|
A note from Brianna: Michelle does not check her MySpace account. I pass along to her, through phone calls and e-mails, as many of your messages and/or comments as I can. That is to say, if it's necessary and not stalker-ish. :) Now, here's the bio, which is really just an article:
Michelle Cross is obsessed with her music. "I [play and write music] all the time. When I don't have a job I'm playing 14 hours a day. When I do have a job I play 4 or 5 hours a day. I have to do it everyday… as much as I can squeeze in." She describes her songs as therapeutic and very personal. "It's like my journal" although she admits she likes to "steal shoes" a lot.
Sprinkled with classical influences and firmly supported by strong vocals, Cross's songs tend to have a darker moodier feel to them. At times, there is a lot of aggression and rhythm in her piano playing, yet even at its most gentle moments her powerfully emotional and melodic piano-based songs have caused listeners to sit-up and pay attention.
Producer Mathew Prock recalls, "…way back when I first started working with Michelle, I was telling someone about her and saying, ‘you have to listen to these songs, they are so great.' So we sat down in the studio… and I was just playing it and kind of listening and my friend was sitting in the back of the room with his girlfriend listening to the song. It got halfway done and I turned around to look at the two of them and they're sitting there with this amazed look on their faces- like this song had totally captured them and they were just speechless, just fully into the song. When it was finished I remember my friend looked at me and said, ‘That's one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard'. That's what Michelle's music tends to do to me as well. I know that other people react that way, [they] just kind of loose themselves in her songs."
Songwriting is a second nature to Cross, who has been churning them out for most of her life. American-born Michelle Shizuka Cross spent the first 12 years of her childhood in Japan. At age 13, her family returned to the United States and she quickly found herself lost in a new country, surrounded by a strange culture. Finding it hard to fit in with others her age, she instead immersed herself in classical piano. Around this time, Cross discovered the music of George Winston and was inspired to try her own hand at composing pieces for piano. A close friend introduced her to early Joni Mitchell records and she began adding lyrical melodies over her existing work.
She continued to develop her own compositions and style and it wasn't long before Cross had gathered a collection of songs and was performing at local coffee houses around the Chicago suburbs. Her musical influences had expanded to include artists such as Sting and Madonna. In particular, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, and Bjork amazed her because "they really are their names, they are themselves completely." Their ability to play spectacular shows both as a band and as a solo artist really hit a chord.
At Hinge studios in Chicago, she met producer and recording engineer Mathew Prock. Prock immediately saw the potential for her songs. "[Mat] pulled me aside and wanted to really do this… He wanted me to stop working with the people I was working with and start working with him. He's the one that really got me thinking, oh, I can do this for real… so that's how it all started and [Mat] really kicked the ball for me." Prock set to work producing the demo. He arranged a full band of talented musicians to support her piano based tunes. Together they added new layers of instruments to create a landscape of sound. March 1999 saw the finish of her first studio demo, "My Name is Not Cinderella".
Cross performed with her band in numerous clubs around Chicago, and as a solo artist at coffee houses and festivals. It wasn't long before she had sold almost all 1000 copies of "Cinderella". It also generated lots of attention. The song "Sushi Queen" was selected as the .1 pick in October 1999 by the editors at Rollingstone.com. In August of 2000, Cross was chosen as garageband.com's third winner- Garageband.com was a "best of the unsigned bands" website where the winner was determined by the reviews of music listeners who listen to the songs randomly from a database of over 15,000 songs.
This also led to industry attention from record labels as well. Requests from A&R people led to working on more songs, more demos- none of which were ever released to the public. Michelle elaborates, "We recorded a countless number of songs, pitching them to labels, waiting – waiting. Some are ‘commercially' inclined, others are just tunes that came to my rescue when I didn't feel like myself anymore." Eventually, Prock and Michelle realized they had enough material for a full-length album, almost enough for two albums. "Every songs was done to a point of being presentable," says Prock. "All had rough edges, or ideas we didn't finish because of time or money constraints. It didn't take long to realize that if we put a little more time into these songs, we would have an awesome collection of songs for people to hear."
This work has led to the completion of Michelle's new CD entitled "Smoke Like Perfume". Anyone who has heard and loved Michelle's music before will definitely be amazed by what they will hear on "Smoke Like Perfume". Armed with a new sense of who she is and what she wants her music to be, Michelle's songs have matured and grown in many ways. Never was there a hesitation to let the songs have a voice of their own, or to go in directions that one wouldn't normally expect. "We did it our way this time, the way we want it to be. No outside influences or directions to make it ‘radio friendly' or ‘commercial'," says Cross. This ideology led to the creation of a diverse collection of songs with many emotional highs and lows and contrasts of aggression and subtlety. "We may not have a label's ability to let everyone hear it, but it's truly me and my music- and I think people will respect that."
Cross promises to be a true rising star to keep a close watch on. In the dawn of her bright future, when asked will she always write songs and play her piano as obsessively as she does now, regardless of what path her music will take, her quick response is, "Oh absolutely, absolutely, because I love doing it. I love it."
|
