Michaelson’s grassroots sensibility has worked like gangbusters: Her music, often about love and relationships, has wafted out of your television in handfuls of Grey’s Anatomy episodes (not to mention countless other series since such as American Idol, Parenthood, and So You Think You Can Dance), in an affecting Google Chrome ad, and on VH1 as an artist You Outta Know. The New York Times marveled that she was “singing her way from obscurity to fame.” Billboard trumpeted her as the face of the new music business. NPR declared, “Ingrid Michaelson is everywhere.” As an independent artist she has sold over 750,000 albums and 3 million singles.

Human Again is a triumph in aural range. The music veers from orchestral (Kahne’s specialty) to percussive, while her accompanying voice swells from contralto to soprano, expanding on her melodic roots. And it’s an ambitious move for Michaelson, one that’s even surprised her parents. “My father said, ‘Where are all the ditties?’” she recalls, laughing. “I said, ‘Well, I think I’m past the ditties, Dad.’ I’m done with that part of my life. I’m ready to think a little bolder.”

Such artistic ambition has always percolated in the blood of this singer-songwriter—who’s also co-written and starred in a semi-autobiographical, comedic pilot that she and improv-actress Rebekka Johnson are shopping around to TV networks. (The show is still untitled.)

Michaelson’s music can be found sound-tracking the romantic-surgical debauchery Grey’s Anatomy with songs such as the cascading “Breakable” and the melancholic lullaby “Keep Breathing.” A music supervisor for Old Navy just happened to catch the episode featuring the latter and snapped up the cooing, calypso-inflected “The Way I Am” for one of the company’s commercials. (The song ultimately went platinum.) Radio play followed, just in time for the release of her 2007 full-length debut, Girls and Boys (out on Cabin 24 Records, her own imprint). This all happened in about a year.