The Spirit Room

About the Album

In the early 2000s, our pop girls were mostly either sugary sweet or angry at the world. They were Britney or they were Alanis because the idea of multifacetedness in female artistry was limited at best. But through those weeds, there were the pop girls who existed somewhere in the middle. Sweet and approachable, but with just a thimble of angst in the mix. Michelle Branch's 2001 debut The Spirit Room isn't the electro-injected sugar high we may expect considering her contemporaries, but instead packs a punch with rock-inspired builds and a simple acoustic guitar. A benchmark break-up album for the ages, it sings of heartbreak and longing to an audience probably only old enough to romanticise the pain she sings about. So influential was this album for young women at the time, it apparently influenced an early Taylor Swift to pick up a guitar and build her own brand of crossover pop.