I am always listening to different kinds of music.

The playlists that fill up my Spotify are all different kinds of music for all different kinds of moods. All throughout my day, new artists will be singing their songs that will eventually find their way into my head.

While I normally discover new music from apps or scrolling through others playlists, I sometimes pick up on my friends and their taste in music. In fact, there was one particular artist who my friend always comments about, but I had never found the interest in listening to her music: Julia Michaels. 

Recently, Michaels produced a new album called Not in Chronological Order. This album consists of 10 perfectly crafted songs ranging in length.

As someone who was quite unfamiliar with the artist, I had little to no idea what to expect when I began to listen to her newest album.

Just as my taste in music is always different, so are the songs in the album. No song is the same, nor do they have any of the same characteristics. Each song has something special about it while also encapsulating the meaning of the album as a whole.

After listening to the whole album, it was easy to pick a few I liked the most.

My favorite song from the album was easily “Orange Magic.” This song was fast paced with a really unique and interesting background sound—which immediately caught my attention. The song was long enough to grasp the meaning of it, but not too long it got boring or made me eventually skip it. “Orange Magic” is most definitely my favorite track on the entire album; while it doesn’t necessarily fit the “break up” vibes of the song, it fits extremely well with the rest of the songs.

Another one of my favorites was “Love is Weird.” This song—being only two and a half minutes—perfectly describes the vibes of the entire album. This song is consistently slow paced, but filled with an amount of heart and soul that you can easily hear from just listening to “Love is Weird” once. It is evident that Michaels put an incredible amount of emotion into this song to make it her own. 

With the least amount of streams in the entire album, “History” is greatly under appreciated. In this song, Michaels and her unique voice is very evident. The song “History” is the definition of short but sweet. While the song has only four verses, it is filled with romance and a sweet, nostalgic feeling. The four verses consist of Michaels asking her significant other many questions to get to know them. 

“Have you ever broken a bone?/What was your teacher’s name in third grade?/Do you cry when movies hit home?/Do you hate your family on holidays?/Have you ever had an existential crisis?” are some of the questions being asked throughout the song. This song is incredibly deep, and I believe, incredibly overlooked.

Even though I have never listened to Michaels before, I can assure you that she is talented, and that her music is a work of art. I cannot honestly say there were any songs in the album that I particularly disliked; I can already see myself repeating the album many times within the next few weeks.