Visiting Artist Series: Julia Michaels (Virtual Event)

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Friday / December 4, 2020 / 1:00 p.m.

Virtual Event

The Berklee Visiting Artist Series is a live, interactive forum featuring some of today's most innovative professional performers and creators. These moderated discussions will focus on the topics of artistry, entrepreneurship, and social justice, and students will have the opportunity to actively participate by posing questions directly to guests. This event features a live interview with Julia Michaels moderated by Paula Cole, visiting scholar in Performance Studies.

Over the past few years, no songwriter has had more of an impact on reshaping pop music than Julia Michaels, a 26-year-old Iowa-born, California-raised artist whose razor-sharp perspective on love, loss, and the wide spectrum of human experience has catapulted her to the forefront of her industry. Lauded for her work on hit singles by artists like Selena Gomez, Dua Lipa, the Chicks, Britney Spears, P!nk, and more, Michaels has spent the last decade honing her craft and delivering fans some of the most evocative music of a generation. Her songs pull no punches, each breath purposeful and powerful in equal measure. Skilled in intuiting artists’ innermost feelings, she has become known for songwriting that plumbs emotional depth without pandering.

In 2017, Michaels embarked on a solo career separate from her work, synthesizing the stories of the stars around her with “Issues,” her five-times-platinum–selling debut single. A year later, her peers recognized her work with Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and Song of the Year. Committing to her solo work, she released a series of critically acclaimed EPs, including 2017’s fan favorite Nervous System and 2019’s critically acclaimed Inner Monologue Part 1 and Inner Monologue Part 2. She also embarked on the Inner Monologue Tour, which marked her first-ever headline tour throughout the U.S., following a run touring the world with an incredible array of artists including Maroon 5, Keith Urban, Shawn Mendes, Niall Horan, and P!nk.

In just three short years, Michaels has established herself as one of music’s most exciting voices both lyrically and sonically. The only peak she’s not yet scaled, she says, is releasing a full-length debut album. So a month into the pandemic, Michaels had a thought: No matter the circumstances, she didn’t want to make an album over Zoom. A few months prior, she’d begun writing new music with the help of Top 40 hitmakers the Monsters & Strangerz. Penned in June after rapid testing made it possible to write and record safely in person again, her first single, “Lie Like This,” is a bouncy, lovestruck new entry in her fast-amassing storybook, evoking pure dance floor energy with a rapid BPM and sparkling neon synths. Following the success of this summer’s "If the World Was Ending," her hit single with JP Saxe (certified platinum, with over 1 billion streams, the song is currently Top 10 at Top 40 radio and approaching the Top 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart), “Lie Like This” is the first glimpse at this new chapter in her life. But Michaels is quick to note that just because she’s in love doesn’t mean she’s lost her edge.