Singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson mesmerizes sold-out audience

At an Ingrid Michaelson concert, you can’t help but feel like that’s one of us up there.

“Damn, I ate a peanut butter-banana sandwich like thirty minutes ago, and now it’s clumping up in my throat,” she admitted after her first song of the night. “I could taste it as I sing.”

Her self-deprecating humor and modest aura makes you forget that you paid 35 bucks and drove 20 miles to see her. As you sink into the night, more and more you see her as your good old friend Ingrid and less as the Ingrid Michaelson whose songs have been featured on numerous movies and TV shows more times than you can count with your fingers.

She seems like one of us, but she’s still the coolest person you’d ever know.

Both her shows on Tuesday and Wednesday in West Hollywood’s legendary Troubadour were sold out weeks in advance. In fact, her entire American tour, which started at the end of August, has been sold out up to this point. The 29-year-old singer-songwriter, who hails from Staten Island, NY, is the newest sensation — she’s the only one who just doesn’t seem to know it.

With her dainty signature ukulele strapped across her torso, Michaelson — along with a complete five-piece band — kicked off the night with “Soldier,” the upbeat first track of her newest album Everybody.

Now, about this band of hers. If Michaelson feels like a good long-time friend at the end of the night, her five band-mates feel like your extended family—goofy, fun, familiar and real.

With two girls on backup guitar and three guys on bass, drums and keyboard, it’s no wonder how they have so much fun up there. Including Michaelson, that’s three on three. The band seems like a musically talented variation of the Friends cast —except spicier. The boys call themselves the ‘Men Squad’ and the girls call themselves the ‘Vag Force.’ In an incredibly off-tangent moment, each group even sang us their chant — with three-part harmonies and everything.

That’s the thing about Michaelson and her crew. Everything seems so effortless, spontaneous and real. They make the audience feel like a part of their funny little family, at least just for one night.

By the second song, everyone in the audience was belting the tunes along, and by the middle of the night after mix-match of both new and familiar songs, the audience was doing choreographed hand motions — complete with jazz hands.

There was also stomping, clapping, howling, what have you, while the band unleashed their energy on tambourines, cowbells, an electric drum set — and of course — looping.

Any fan of Michaelson would know this to be the main element to her songs. Using this process of looping fragments of her song over one another, she creates a perfect harmony between passion and serenity.

She achieved this same effect live to utmost perfection Wednesday night with Allie and Bess on back-up vocals. A highlight of this effect was during “The Chain” from her new record when the vocal build-up of the loops simultaneously drew strong emotions of passion, excitement and liberation.

As for the encore, she and her band defied tradition as per usual and cooked up something spicy again: a song about Mexican cuisine.

That’s the thing about Ingrid. She can make your heart wrench with the realness of her music and, almost right away, make you cry from laughter.

Oh, that is just so Ingrid.