Pianist and Singer Michaela Allen Debuts New Album at Orchid Denver

British pianist and singer Michaela Allen has a bubbly, bright demeanor, but behind her positivity are deep scars. While other children basked in the warm glow of a relatively carefree childhood, at age ten Allen faced an emotionally abusive middle school music teacher who swiftly dampened her passion for music.

"I had a natural affinity for the piano. It just made sense to me," Allen says. "So I was very much encouraged as a kid. And then I got to middle school, and that just kind of went away." Her teacher's words were often cutting, discouraging Allen's love for the piano so persistently that she was forced to walk away. She stopped singing and withdrew from her school's orchestra, cutting the teacher's overwhelming negativity from her life.

But Allen still held on to the piano, and her eyes shine as she recalls those early, formative moments. She taught herself how to play by deconstructing and mimicking her favorite pop songs, banging on the piano with her friends and absorbing musical knowledge with unmatched zeal. "[My friends] would be super excited about it. I'd be super excited. So music has always been a really, really positive and personal thing for me in the way that I can connect to people," Allen says.

Her self-taught, pop-infused piano skills were enough to take her to England's Leed Conservatoire for a degree in piano performance when she was eighteen. The conservatory fixed her technical skills and rebuilt her into a classically trained pianist — but at a high price. By Allen's third year, the pressure of school coupled with a toxic relationship brought her to a breaking point, and she developed anorexia.

"[Music] gets very, very personal, and I think I was in this personal bubble of trying to understand music, trying to understand everything and trying to be really good at what I did," Allen reflects.

She remembers the struggle of straining toward perfectionism while facing invalidation and elitism from classical music circles. "I didn't get the response I expected from other people," she says. "So I just think it was a lot of self-deprecation." She emphasizes that classical music "is not meant to be about brilliance, and that's what the narrative has been. ... It's like, if you're not the most technically gifted, then you can't actually play."
In 2019, two years after her health began to falter, Allen came to the United States on a trip with her sister. On a crowded, muggy bus going from Las Vegas to Arizona, Allen met her future husband. "There was a connection that really, really shifted something in me, and I felt we were seeing each other and really connecting on quite a phenomenal level," Allen says. "I tried to ignore it because I was like, 'That was just meeting somebody, whatever.'"

Despite her doubts, Allen and her soon-to-be husband (an Englewood native) didn't stop talking. She visited his Colorado home for the first time in 2019, where she "fell in love with the mountains [and] the people out here," Allen says.

She decided to stay in Colorado for graduate school, and moved to Denver in 2020 after accepting an offer to Colorado State University, where she graduated with her master's in piano performance in May 2022. Since graduating, Allen has stayed in Denver, where she's been writing and recording her debut album, LDR, an acronym for "little dark raincloud." She will be performing the full, unreleased album at the Orchid on Thursday, August 3.

The album is a sentiment to Allen's continued healing, reflecting on the roots of her deep-seated trauma while celebrating the six years that have passed since that dark time in her life. She started writing the album, which she is releasing single by single, in the summer last year after reaching what she calls a "trauma breakthrough."

"I started to hear more [music] in my head. And the more I've been healing from everything, the more I've heard," she says. "And it's all these associations that produce music, and I've just ignored them before, but I was like, 'Okay, I'm actually going to pay attention to these thoughts.'"

The smoky, raw debut single, "LDR," illustrates Allen's past toxic relationship, while the rest of the album symbolizes her recovery. The song's haunting lyrics, such as, "I'd sell my soul but not my sanity," flow over a jazzy, instrumental foundation with the occasional addition of a synth wail. The single's repetitive, almost addictive quality seems to mimic Hector Berlioz's use of an ideé fixe in the famed Symphonie Fantastique. The ideé fixe, or "obsession," is represented by a repeatedly occurring musical idea, a tactic Allen employed to represent the vicious cycle of addictive, toxic love. The next song set to drop from the upcoming album is "Atlas," on August 18. Allen plans to release the full album on streaming services by January 2024.

"I'm just really excited to play with people live and to share my music," Allen says about her upcoming show. "Personally, it's a big progression [from] not really being able to do anything or say anything. I've been too scared to share what I have to say."

Michaela Allen at the Orchid, 1448 Market Street, Thursday, August 3; dinner show at 6:30 p.m., rooftop set at 9 p.m. Admission is free; RVSP here.