Michigander

Jason Singer thought his 2025 full-length debut as Michigander would change everything about his life and work. During the prior decade, after all, Singer had cobbled together the start of a successful career as an incisive and infectious songwriter from the stuff the music industry considers scraps—a half-dozen singles and a quartet of EPs, collectively suggesting he was one of indie rock’s sharpest new tunesmiths. Surely, then, his self-titled start—recorded over the course of a year, with real support from a bona fide team of advisers and collaborators—would boost him several levels, getting him a little closer to his teenaged premonition that he’d be headlining arenas within five years of finishing high school. But as you may already know, that didn’t happen. Michigander felt only like the upper lip of the plateau Singer had been climbing for a decade already. So what, he wondered, was he supposed to do now? The answer that came back was obvious: Keep writing.

Over Before You Know It is the magnetic and relatable result of that work and the broad but detailed view from the top of that plateau. Across 10 songs written and recorded quickly with a crew of close friends at home in Nashville (including producers and pals Jeremy Lutito, Collin Pastore, and Jake Finch), Singer mixes self-criticism with music industry sendups, sad-eyed contemplations with unguarded love songs. He offers up the things that almost stopped him and those that now keep him going with a rare admixture of candor and catchiness. This, turns out, is the level up. Like Loudon Wainwright III fronting some boundless pop-rock band from the heyday of Barsuk Records, Singer makes these deeply probing songs feel expert and effortless, as if he took a big enough step back from his own life to see the whole thing clearly, then said, “Fuck it, man, let’s turn that into a song.”

The story of Michigander’s second album, to be released by Thirty Tigers, begins well before the release of the first one. In 2024, Singer was scheduled to run the South by Southwest gauntlet, set for nine shows in only three days. He was deep into work on his debut, but his life felt upside down. Just as the post-pandemic world began opening up, in 2022, Singer broke his leg in the California mountains. A month later, his wife, Britney, was walking to work in Nashville when a truck blew through a stop sign and ran her over, nearly killing her. And then, as she recovered, doctors discovered that his mother had a brain tumor. By the time he got to Austin, in March 2024, he thought life was finally mellowing. Nevertheless, he had a panic attack during a business meeting in a ramen shop, got rushed to a hospital, and absolutely thought he was going to die. He even hurriedly wrote a goodbye letter on his phone, just in case he was gone for good.

That sensation is at the core of “Freaking Out,” the dissociative anthem that is, in turn, at the core of Over Before You Know It. Singer tells us clearly about all that’s going wrong, from the weed that seems to be cleaving him from reality to his world that seems forever wobbling. “I don’t know about you,” he deadpans, “but I haven’t been happy in a while.” In the chorus, though, Singer lands on a line that pushes these three minutes well beyond complaints: “This is what it feels like to be alive,” he sings, the sound of a smile stretched across his lips. The first song Singer wrote for Over Before You Know It is, fittingly, the start of his reckoning.

After a few years of consistent talk therapy and EMDR, Singer now feels better than he ever has as an adult. But Over Before You Know It is sort of the last gasp of all these misgivings, as he realizes which people and perceptions he can dismiss, as he accepts which social patterns he truly cannot change. A lot of this has to do with the music industry itself: “Taxi,” a two-minute burst of handclap joy, is about those dudes who won’t stop telling you about the pivotal role they played on, like, some Gnarls Barkley album 20 years ago, about the proclivity to continuously cash in on old glory that was never truly yours. A hair metal anthem reimagined for a little rock club, “Good Things” is about the arbitrary nature of success, or how notions of hard work and perseverance are only as good as the luck that they do or don’t encounter along the way. And the hilarious and unexpected “Oh, Good!” turns a springy LCD Soundsystem beat into satire of influencers masquerading as artists and rich kids singing about their blue-collar troubles.

Singer also takes long, unflinching looks at himself here. During the gorgeous and bittersweet “YYY,” he thinks about the friends he’s lost, wondering what part of the fallout was his fault and what part of it was simply him trying to be himself, to fully exist. And inspired by his pal’s sage advice that our personal problems will not survive us, “Outlive” is a rock song for the catastrophist in us all, for those who see the bad things—the bad weather, the insufficient funds—and take that as the entirety of our existence. What emerges is a spirited note to self to keep going and to look up as you remember to do just that.

Perhaps all this sounds overly specific—Singer’s ripostes of the music industry after his first album failed to meet his expectations, his repudiations of himself and the company he has kept after he has been let down. But it is all a vehicle for Singer to think about becoming the person he still wants to be, for being grateful enough for what he already has to keep going. To be there is to be human. That is especially clear at the end of Over Before You Know It, starting with “Float,” a purely beautiful love song about how he and Whitney offer one another anchors and life jackets as each new crisis commands. That feeling flows into the closing title track, an unabashed power ballad about mortality and meaning. It’s not necessarily about being content but at least about not breaking your back or brain over the things you have yet to accomplish. Sure, it’s over before you know it. But it’s over a lot faster, Singer has now realized, if you don’t take time to enjoy whatever it actually is.