The Singles Bar: Birch gives necessary ‘Spelling Lessons’

Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.

She was just a kid when she learned the hard truth of the patriarchy. Songwriter, musician and producer Michelle Birsky was a wide-eyed sixth grader, and a normal day to the library would upend her sense of worth and position in this world. “The first time I was taught that girls exist for boys, not with boys, I was in sixth grade, and I bent over in the library to grab a book,” she recalls each devastating detail. “My shirt rode up a bit showing part of my back, and the librarian standing nearby chastised me telling me, ‘Young lady, your back is showing. I won’t have you in here distracting the boys.'” Shock doesn’t even begin to describe what Birksy, who utilizes such misogynistic fuel into her onstage and recording persona called Birch, felt that day.

“Too young to have been sexualized yet, I couldn’t understand why my body would somehow distract the boys from learning,” she continues. “Instead of yelling at girls for their clothes being too short, why can’t we just teach boys that girls are not objects?”

The 2016 election, which has torn society apart, erupting into an age of reckoning for predators and all their ilk, has further empowered women to step into the spotlight to tell their stories. Birch, who pursued music theory and composition studies at Kenyon College of Ohio, displays her own wounds with a new song called “Spelling Lessons,” which is both framed with remarkable wisdom and a long-lost innocence, almost magical to the touch. “So, look me in the eye / Listen while I speak / I was a little girl / I still deserve to see,” she sings, bouncing briskly between brick-baked layers. She revisits her past with a calm demeanor, simply collecting up the pieces of her youth as a way to make sense of today’s continuing machismo and its damage. “Thought I was a mannequin / But I don’t pose,” she later depicts of her journey. She surveys the scene with resolution glistening off her pupils, and her pen stabs against paper for rich images of womanhood and defying tradition.

“Spelling Lessons,” co-produced alongside Ariel Loh, sets fire to Birsky’s troubled fear of speaking out. The flames are all-consuming and digest every ounce of her pain in thick licks. The drums chomp at her heels, and her celestial voice clips at break-neck speed onto the horizon, resulting in a weighted, yet still rather divine, performance. She wraps her warms around other women in doing so, as a reminder to cherish the soul buried beneath flesh and bone ⏤ and the male gaze.

Birsky’s new album femme.one arrives April 5.

Listen below:

Photo Credit: Off Season Creative

Follow Birch on her socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Website