Michelle Branch

About Michelle Branch

Michelle Jacquet Branch-Landau (born July 2, 1983) is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. She made her debut in 2000, and released the platinum-selling albums The Spirit Room and Hotel Paper in August 2001 and June 2003 respectively. During this period, she collaborated with Santana on the single "The Game of Love", which won a Grammy Award. In 2004, she formed the musical duo The Wreckers with fellow musician Jessica Harp. Michelle Branch will release her third solo album with Maverick, Everything Comes and Goes, in the summer of 2008.

Michelle was born nine weeks premature in Phoenix, Arizona on July 2, 1983, and was named after the Beatles' song "Michelle". Though the surname Branch is French, her father is of Irish ancestry while her mother was born in the Netherlands; her maternal grandmother was a Dutch Indonesian and was held by the Japanese in an internment camp during World War II, while her maternal grandfather was French and Indonesian. She has an older half-brother, David, and a younger sister, Nicole.

Branch started taking voice lessons at a local university when she was 8 years old. She received a guitar for her fourteenth birthday from her uncle. She locked herself in her room and taught herself chords; within a few days she had composed her first song. She focused on the arts during high school, and was writing songs extensively. She attended Sedona Red Rock High School in Sedona but with the support of her parents, decided to continue her high school education through home schooling, which allowed her to follow her dreams of becoming a singer-songwriter. She had begged her parents to allow her to leave regular high school, and one night at dinner she asked why she had to go back to school, and to her surprise, her father replied with, "Yeah, why does she?" She played at clubs for years and released her debut album Broken Bracelet independently in 2000.