Michelle Jacquet DeSevren Branch (born July 2, 1983) is a singer, songwriter and guitarist. She made her debut in 2000, and released the platinum-selling albums The Spirit Room and Hotel Paper in subsequent years. In 2005, she formed the band The Wreckers with fellow musician Jessica Harp.
Branch was born seven weeks premature in Flagstaff, Arizona and was named after The Beatles' song " Michelle". Her father is of Irish ancestry and her mother is of Dutch, Indonesian ( Javanese), and French ancestry. She has an older half-brother, David, and a younger sister, Nicole.
Branch first wanted to write songs as soon as she hit her teens, beginning to write shortly after that. She received a guitar for her fourteenth birthday, and later signed up for vocal classes. She focussed on the arts during high school, and was writing songs extensively. She attended Red Rock High School in Sedona but never finished her course, opting instead to follow her dreams of becoming a singer-songwriter. She played clubs for years, and released her debut album Broken Bracelet independently in 2000.
She signed a record deal with Madonna's record company Maverick while opening for Hanson in December 2000. Her first album under Maverick, The Spirit Room, was released in August 2001 and went onto sell over one million copies in the U.S. The single "Everywhere" became a worldwide top twenty hit, and was followed by the U.S. top ten hit "All You Wanted" and the top forty single "Goodbye to You". Branch was frequently compared (both positively and negatively) to other singer-songwriters as Alicia Keys, Avril Lavigne and Vanessa Carlton, who rose to prominence at around the same time as her. In 2002, Branch was the lead vocalist on Carlos Santana's song "The Game of Love", which became her first single to reach the U.S. top five and went on to win a Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration.