Singer-songwriter Michaela Anne seeks a selfless and unconditional love on the bittersweet "Who You Are." The song was inspired by wisdom imparted by the singer's mother right before she suffered a hemorrhagic stroke.
"This song is really about the challenge and desire to see the people we love for who they are and not within the framework of how we want or need them to be for ourselves," Michaela Anne tells Wide Open Country. "This song has only deepened in meaning for me as I've become a mother while also enduring (and watching my family navigate) the sustained trauma and struggle of my mother's stroke."?
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Michaela spent months in the hospital by her mom's side and watched as parents navigated the aftermath of such a devastating experience and change to their lives and relationship. She called the experience "a master class in the truest, rawest meaning of sacrifice, love, commitment, devotion and the reality that it is not easy or always pretty but very exposing of our truest character."
"So much of our relationships are about how we need our partner to be for us, how we need our parents to be for us, how we need our children to be for us," Michaela Anne said in a press statement. "But the hard work and depth of love comes when you can take yourself out of the equation and love someone the way they need to be loved, when you can see them for who they are without the framing of how you want them to be."
Michaela Anne recently shared a cover of Carole King's 1970 classic "Child of Mine."
The Nashville-based artist released her album Desert Dove in 2019.