Michelle's debut record, "Second Guesses" is available now.

Classically trained on piano since the age of 5, Michelle has been singing "forever," and began writing her own songs at age 15. Not counting, of course, her first ever original song, entitled "Nobody Knows the Words" – involving the repetition of that phrase over and over again and the plunking of very low piano notes, in sort of a 20th century avant garde style – which was in fact penned at age 2-1/2.

Music has always surrounded Michelle – in the basement her dad would be listening to Zeppelin and Tom Waits, in the kitchen her mom would sing along to Stevie Wonder. On stage by age 12 and loving it, Michelle's passion for music guided her through her high school years, during which time she developed her skill as a writer and performer, and ultimately led her to New York City where she attended NYU. Throughout her four years of college, she put together a band and continued writing and playing shows around New York, finally graduating in 2002 with a degree in music education.

Finding it hard to keep up with the expense of producing more than 3 or 4 tracks at a time, Michelle never was able to put her songs together for a full album – that is, until she hit the jackpot in 2004 when she sang the theme song to Winx Club, a now immensely popular Saturday morning cartoon. With the royalties she earned from that effort, Michelle finally had the financial support to realize her first full length record, a diverse collection of 11 self-penned songs.

"I did a lot of listening to other records while working on mine and what I noticed on many of the older recordings that I've loved for years is that the instrumentation is built around the songs, rather than the other way around," Michelle muses. "It's amazing how a song with just one voice and just one instrument can be so much more powerful than a big track without a solid structure underneath it. That's what I strived for when creating my material for this record – I wanted to write songs that would still be songs even if they were stripped down to just piano and vocal."

Each song on the record tells a story, each one shows a piece of Michelle from a different angle. Her music is a reflection of her personality – sometimes soft and sweet, sometimes sharp and dry humored, usually soulful, a contradiction of both pure strength and thoughtful indecision. You feel like you know her. Her words are her own and she instinctively chooses her melodies and rhythms to wrap around them. You can trust her, and you're cheering her on.

Now at age 24 and on the heels of her debut independent release, Michelle is poised for 2005 to be a breakthrough year.