Ingrid Michaelson suspects she achieved her commercial breakthrough with "The Way I Am" because she happened to write a lyric about a sweater. The sweet love song about finding unconditional love and being a supportive partner - "If you are chilly, here take my sweater," she sings - got a huge boost when it soundtracked a national ad campaign for Old Navy sweaters in 2007. The exposure helped the single climb from #80 to #37 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The song peaked at #2 on the Adult Alternative Songs chart and #20 on the Adult Contemporary chart.
"The Way I Am" was used on Grey's Anatomy ("Six Days: Part 2" - 2007) in scenes with two different couples having relationship issues. It marked the beginning of Michaelson's long association with the show, which went on to incorporate her tunes - including "Keep Breathing" - over a dozen more times throughout its run.
Michaelson self-released
Girls And Boys, her second album, in 2006. After "The Way I Am" started making the rounds on TV, she caught the interest of several record labels but, wanting to maintain control over her career, she founded her own label, Cabin 24 Records. She inked a deal with Original Signal Recordings for help with marketing and distribution, and reissued the album in 2007. Michaelson found the joint venture worked so well that there was never a need to sign with a major label.
She
explained in a 2024 Songfacts interview: "No record label wanted to touch me until all of the sudden I was getting all these syncs on TV shows. Then all of a sudden, all these labels were like, 'Do you want to sign?' My manager and I were like, 'We've been doing this for eight months without any label. Why would we give away 50% of everything when we already did the work?' Throughout my career, we've done joint ventures with a label where we've licensed to a label for two years. Or just released it on my own. It's just how the cookie crumbled. I never intended to do it that way, it just seemed to make the most sense at the time, and then we did what made the most sense."
Michaelson considers Girls And Boys her first proper album. She did release Slow The Rain a year earlier, but she'd rather everyone forget about it. "There's little bits up on YouTube, but I tried to erase it from the history books. I went to school for musical theater and came off in that world writing in that vein," she told Songfacts.
A summer spent listening to Regina Spektor and Death Cab For Cutie on repeat, specifically their respective albums Soviet Kitsch and Transatlanticism, set her on a different path.
"They changed the way I thought about writing and what I wanted to write," she continued. "I was pulling myself more away from musical theater and starting to play shows. That helped me hone this indie-pop sound and that's what I've been rolling with for many years, never veering too far off the path."
Michaelson performed this song on The Muppets in the 2016 episode "Got Silk?"
This was also used in the 2014 movie Moms' Night Out in a scene where the main character, Allyson (Sarah Drew), gets ready for a night out.
In the music video, directed by Autumn de Wilde (Florence and the Machine, Death Cab For Cutie), Michaelson feels like an outcast as the only person not dressed like a clown at a dance. She retreats to the bathroom, where she uses her lipstick to draw a clown nose on the mirror and scrawls the word "freak." When she emerges, she runs into her dance partner, played by her future husband Greg Laswell. He embraces her, and they leave together.
Like most artists, Michaelson went through a period of being sick to death of her hit song, but she re-embraced it when she saw what it meant to people. "I love it, I love the legacy that it has, I love how many people it's touched," she said. "I've ushered people down many aisles. I love that I've been people's first-dance songs, that I'm part of the fabric of these people's lives. It's an indescribable feeling, gratitude for sure. And just bizarreness. I love the song, but I love its legacy more."
Caroline Pennell performed this for her winning knockout round on season 5 of The Voice in 2013.
Michaelson made her network TV debut when she performed "The Way I Am" on Last Call with Carson Daly on September 21, 2007.
