julia michaels

“I love New York,” Julia Michaels tells me, only a few minutes into our interview, from her Los Angeles home. Straight off, the singer and songwriter, who will turn 29 this year, is a lesson in dichotomies. She loves New York because it “feels communal,” in stark contrast to the place that Dorothy Parker once deemed “72 suburbs in search of a city,” a sentiment Michaels seems to echo. “LA is so spread out and nobody really walks here and it doesn’t…it doesn’t have the same liveliness, I think,” she says. In pursuit of an acting career, her father moved the family to California from Iowa when Michaels was a child, changing his last name professionally from Cavazos to Michaels in the process, a tradition she carried on. “I don’t think it’s the environment that makes humans, humans,” she wise...