Meet Lauren-Michael Sellers of Nashville

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren-Michael Sellers.

Hi Lauren-Michael, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I started performing when I was six years old, so music has been the throughline of my life for as long as I can remember. Long before I understood it as a career, though, I understood it as a safe place. I learned to play instruments, started writing and composing, and eventually realized I could take things I didn’t know how to say out loud and put them somewhere inside a song.

I was born in Texas, raised in Missouri, shaped by family roots in Georgia and West Virginia, spent more than a decade in Alabama, and finally made my way to Nashville in 2021. So I took both the scenic and geographically confusing route here😂 I think you can hear all of those places in my music somewhere. There’s country in it, but also Americana, folk, soul, gospel…apparently I’ve never been particularly interested in staying inside one box.

And my road to doing this professionally wasn’t exactly linear either. I spent more than a decade in education, earned a couple of graduate degrees, led worship, and built a whole life while this stubborn little voice in me kept saying, “You’re supposed to be making music.” Eventually I got brave enough, or possibly just tired enough of arguing with it, to listen.

There have been some pretty surreal chapters since then, including being on Season 26 of The Voice with Reba, but the biggest shift in my artistry happened when I stopped trying to figure out what I was supposed to sound like and started telling the truth.

I write about the things I know: growing up too fast, addiction and mental illness in a family, grief, loving people you can’t save, faith, survival, healing, and somehow learning to hope again. For years I thought those were things I needed to get past. Now I realize they’re part of what gave me something to say.

And lately, something pretty extraordinary has been happening. These songs have started finding people. Millions of people have watched, listened to and shared them, this beautiful community has grown around the music incredibly quickly, and doors I’ve dreamed about for most of my life are beginning to open. I’m enormously grateful and also still occasionally looking around like, “Y’all are sure you meant me, right?” 😂

Right now, I’m recording my debut album, The Woman With Nothing to Lose. In a lot of ways, it feels like every version of me finally meeting in the same room.

At the heart of all of it, though, the dream really hasn’t changed much since I was that six-year-old kid. I want to make music that tells the truth, makes people feel something, and gives a little company to the people carrying things they don’t always know how to say out loud.

I make music for the people who grew up too fast, loved too hard, and kept going anyway. Turns out, I’m one of them too.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No. Not even remotely.

There have been beautiful people and beautiful moments throughout my life, and I never want the difficult parts of my story to erase those. But if I’m being truthful, I learned how to survive long before I learned how to dream.

I’m the oldest daughter of five children, and I grew up in a home deeply affected by my mother’s severe mental illness and addiction. Because I was the oldest, I became “Mom” long before I understood what being somebody’s mother actually meant. I helped raise my younger siblings. I worried about whether they were fed, whether they were safe, what kind of mood we were walking into, and what needed to happen next. I learned how to read a room the way some kids learn to read a book.

When you’re a child living inside instability, you don’t necessarily know that your life is unstable. It’s just Tuesday.

By the time I was starting ninth grade, my mother lost custody of all five of us and we were separated. I went to live with my father, a man I barely knew at the time, and eventually his wife, who is one of the kindest people I know. They gave me stability and loved me tremendously, but love doesn’t work like an eraser. They couldn’t undo what had already happened to me, no matter how much I think all of us probably wished they could.

That’s something I’ve had to make peace with as an adult. Healing, at least for me, hasn’t meant arriving at some magical place where none of it hurts anymore. Some things leave fingerprints. I still carry pieces of that little girl with me. I just know how to take care of her differently now.

Music was how I took care of her then.

I had been performing since I was six, but somewhere in the middle of everything unraveling, I started writing constantly. I was journaling one day when a teacher looked at what I had written and essentially said, “You know these look like songs, right?” That observation changed the trajectory of my life. Eventually, music became my total focus and led to a full scholarship to study voice and music composition.

I sometimes wonder whether I chose songwriting or songwriting chose me because I needed somewhere for all of it to go.

And trauma is complicated because surviving the original thing doesn’t mean you stop recreating pieces of it.

I spent more than eight years in a relationship, and was eventually engaged, to someone who, in ways I couldn’t understand while I was inside of it, recreated many of the emotional patterns I had grown up with. I’m careful saying that because I don’t think healing requires turning another person into a villain. I can have compassion for someone and still acknowledge that a relationship was deeply unhealthy for me.

What I’ve had to confront is my own part in why it felt familiar enough to stay.

When you’ve spent childhood learning that love means managing instability, anticipating someone’s emotions, forgiving the unforgivable, and trying hard enough to save somebody, chaos can feel strangely like home. I didn’t consciously choose my childhood again. I just hadn’t learned yet that familiar and safe are two very different things.

That realization has probably informed my songwriting as much as anything I’ve lived through.

My mother ultimately died from an overdose in 2021. I didn’t get to say goodbye.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with losing someone you’ve spent much of your life trying to save. You don’t just grieve the person who died. You grieve who they were, who they might have been, the relationship you had, the relationship you desperately wanted, and finally the realization that there will never be enough time to make any of it different.

And still, I loved her.

That’s probably one of the greatest truths my life has taught me: two things can be true at once. Someone can hurt you profoundly and you can love them profoundly. You can understand why someone became who they became without pretending their choices didn’t wound you. You can forgive somebody and still need a boundary. You can miss somebody and still be angry. You can heal and still have scars.

A lot of my songs live in that “and.”

Meanwhile, I became extremely good at building a functional life. I earned multiple graduate degrees, became a special education teacher, spent more than a decade in education, led worship, and devoted a tremendous amount of my adult life to taking care of and advocating for other people. I’m deeply proud of that chapter of my life. In hindsight, it’s also not particularly surprising that the little girl who learned her value through taking care of everybody grew up and chose professions centered around taking care of everybody.

Apparently subtlety has never been my strong suit.

All the while, I was writing.

Moving to Nashville in 2021 didn’t suddenly make the road smooth either. There wasn’t a trust fund or an industry machine waiting for me when I got here. There were bills, jobs, rejection, financial uncertainty, closed doors, comparison, and plenty of nights wondering whether believing this deeply in myself was courage or some highly specific form of delusion.

I’ve also had to confront the idea that I was “late.” I didn’t arrive in this industry at 19 with a five-year plan and an appropriately marketable amount of life experience. I arrived as a grown woman with graduate degrees, a teaching career, a complicated family history, a broken engagement, grief, faith, scars, and a whole lot of songs.

For years I thought those things were evidence that I had somehow gotten off course.

Now I think they were the course.

Even today, as millions of people are discovering my music and I’m suddenly walking into rooms I spent years dreaming about, there is a wonderfully humbling absurdity to being in between two lives. I’ve gone from music industry meetings, performances and writing sessions right back to clocking into a regular job. Nothing will give you an existential crisis quite like watching your music go viral and then remembering you still have a work schedule.

But the hardest work hasn’t really been professional. It’s been internal.

The skills that made me an incredibly capable survivor don’t always make life particularly easy as an adult. Hyper-independence helped me survive, but it made accepting help terrifying. Learning to anticipate everybody else’s needs made me compassionate, but left me surprisingly disconnected from my own. Being able to endure almost anything made me strong, but it also meant I sometimes stayed in places long after I should have left them.

I’ve had to learn that love and rescue aren’t the same thing. That empathy doesn’t require self-abandonment. That boundaries aren’t punishment. That my worth isn’t measured by how useful I can make myself to another person. And maybe hardest of all, I’ve had to learn that when something beautiful happens, I don’t have to immediately start looking over my shoulder for the fire.

I’m still learning.

I don’t think trauma ever completely disappears. I don’t particularly believe in the version of healing where you become so evolved that nothing hurts anymore. For me, healing has looked much more like learning what belongs to me, what doesn’t, and what I want to do with everything I had no choice but to carry.

I chose to make something out of it.

That’s why I’m not writing songs from some perfectly healed mountaintop. I’m writing them from inside the process. When I sing about growing up too fast, loving people you can’t save, putting out fires you didn’t start, breaking cycles, grief, forgiveness or finding your way back to yourself, those aren’t concepts I researched for a song. I know them.

For years, I thought all the detours meant I was behind.

Now I understand that I needed to live long enough to have something to say.

So no, it hasn’t been a smooth road. It’s been heartbreaking, beautiful, complicated, occasionally ridiculous, and frankly a little overcommitted to character development.

But it gave me my empathy. It gave me my perspective. It gave me my songs.

And somewhere along the way, the little girl who spent her childhood trying to save everybody else finally started learning how to save herself.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
At the simplest level, I’m a singer-songwriter and storyteller. I make music somewhere at the intersection of Country, Americana, Folk and Soul, although I’ve never been particularly interested in figuring out exactly which shelf I’m supposed to sit on. If it tells the truth and makes me feel something, I’m probably going to chase it.

I think what I’m becoming known for most is taking really difficult, deeply human experiences and turning them into songs that somehow don’t leave people feeling hopeless.

I write a lot about family, addiction, mental illness, grief, complicated love, faith, trauma, breaking generational cycles, and what happens after survival. Not just surviving something, but the much messier question of who you become afterward. There is usually darkness somewhere in my songs because there has been darkness in my life, but I almost always find myself reaching toward hope. Sometimes it’s redemption. Sometimes it’s forgiveness. Sometimes hope is simply realizing you survived the thing you were certain would destroy you.

And I think my voice reflects that too. I’ve always had a big voice. There is absolutely no delicate way to put that. I can be loud. But as I’ve grown as an artist, I’ve become much more interested in what happens before the big note. The crack in a voice, the breath you almost don’t hear, the lyric that makes an entire room go quiet. Power isn’t always volume. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do as a singer is trust the song enough not to get in its way.

That’s probably where my background as a songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist intersects most with who I am as a vocalist. I’m not approaching a song thinking only about how I can sing it. I’m thinking about the entire emotional architecture of it: where the lyric needs space, where the melody should ache a little, where an instrument can say something the words can’t, and where everything needs to disappear so the truth of the lyric is completely exposed.

What sets me apart is probably the same thing I spent years worrying might keep me from fitting in.

I didn’t come to this career with a perfectly curated artist origin story. I came to it with a lot of life.

I spent more than a decade as a special education teacher. I’ve led worship. I have multiple graduate degrees. I’ve been a caretaker, an oldest daughter, a trauma survivor, a woman rebuilding herself after loss and unhealthy relationships, and somebody who spent years doing the responsible thing while quietly wondering whether she was abandoning the thing she was actually put here to do.

All of that walks into the writing room with me.

I’m also not particularly interested in pretending I’ve figured everything out. I don’t want to stand onstage and sing at people from the other side of some perfectly healed life. I want to sit beside them in the uncomfortable middle of it and say, “Yeah. Me too.”

That’s the relationship I want with the people who listen to my music.

The thing I’m most proud of right now isn’t a number, although watching millions of people discover these songs and seeing this community grow so quickly has been completely surreal. It’s what people are telling me the songs are doing once they find them.

People have shared pieces of their lives with me that I know aren’t easy to say out loud. They’ve told me a lyric gave language to something they’d carried for years, or made them feel understood, or helped them realize they weren’t the only person who grew up that way. There are messages I have to put my phone down after reading because I need a minute.

That’s the part I don’t ever want to become normal.

And I think my responsibility as an artist extends beyond the songs.

I’ve spent most of my life in some form of service, whether that was teaching children with disabilities, advocating for families, leading worship, or simply being the person who noticed when somebody was being overlooked. I don’t think that part of me disappears if the stages get bigger. If anything, I believe a larger platform creates a greater responsibility, and hopefully greater resources, to do something meaningful with it.

Philanthropy and advocacy are a huge part of what I want my career to become. I care deeply about children and families affected by addiction and mental illness, trauma survivors, access to education, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people who have been made to believe there isn’t room for both their faith and who they are, and people whose voices are too often ignored or dismissed. Those aren’t causes I selected because they make sense for an artist’s brand. They’re communities and experiences that have intersected with my actual life.

I’ve never been particularly good at witnessing something unjust and quietly deciding it isn’t my business. Occasionally, that has made my life more complicated. I suspect it will continue to.

But if I’m fortunate enough to build the kind of career I’m working toward, I don’t want success to terminate with me. I want to create opportunities, fund things that matter, show up when showing up is inconvenient, advocate when staying quiet would be easier, and eventually build something that continues helping people whether my name is attached to it or not.

I’ve always admired artists who understood that a platform can be more than a spotlight. It can be a tool.

Right now, I’m recording my debut album, The Woman With Nothing to Lose, and that title probably says more about where I am professionally and personally than anything else could.

This record isn’t about having nothing left. It’s about what happens when you’ve spent enough of your life being afraid that you finally realize fear has already taken enough from you. There is an enormous amount of freedom in reaching the point where you’re willing to tell the truth about who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve survived, what you believe, whom you’ve loved, and what it cost you to become yourself.

That’s the artist I’m interested in being.

I want to make records that sound incredible. I want big stages and a long career and all the ridiculous, beautiful things I’ve dreamed about since I was six years old. But I also want to be very careful about what I do if I’m fortunate enough to get those things.

Because ultimately, I don’t think legacy is just about the songs people remember you for. I think it’s also about what you did with the attention while people were listening.

I want to build a body of work that means something after the noise around it is gone. I want the music to make people feel less alone, and I want the life I build around that music to leave people, communities and places better than I found them.

If there’s anything I hope I’m eventually known for, it’s that I told the truth, I sang the absolute hell out of it, I stood up for people when it mattered, and I left people feeling a little less alone and a little more hopeful than I found them.

Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
I think the biggest thing I’ve learned about networking is to stop treating it like networking.

This is Nashville. Eventually everybody knows everybody, which is both wonderful and mildly terrifying.

But genuinely, the relationships that have meant the most to me haven’t come from walking into a room thinking, “What can this person do for my career?” They’ve come from being curious about people, listening to them, showing up consistently, supporting their work, and letting relationships develop without trying to force an outcome.

I think people can feel the difference between being valued as a person and being viewed as an opportunity.

The same is true with mentors. Some of the people who have taught me the most probably wouldn’t even call themselves my mentors. They’ve been teachers, fellow writers, producers, artists, friends and people further down the road who were generous enough to tell me the truth. Sometimes mentorship is a formal relationship, but often it’s simply paying attention when someone with more experience is willing to let you learn from theirs.

I’ve also learned not to enter every room trying to prove that I belong there. Earlier in my life and career, I think I felt like I needed to convince people of my value. These days, I try to walk in knowing what I bring while remaining genuinely interested in what everyone else brings too. Confidence and humility don’t have to be opposites.

And give before you ask.

Share somebody’s song. Show up for their show. Make an introduction when you can. Celebrate their win when there is absolutely nothing in it for you. Remember what they told you the last time you talked. Send the text because you genuinely thought of them, not because you suddenly need something.

That sounds incredibly simple, but I think people remember how you make them feel far longer than they remember whatever impressive thing you told them about yourself.

I’ve also become much more intentional about protecting relationships from becoming transactional as my career grows. Not every person I meet needs to become a collaborator, business connection or stepping stone. Some people are just supposed to become friends. Some are supposed to teach you something. Some you may get to help. Some may help you. And occasionally somebody enters your life and, years later, you realize the relationship changed everything.

You can’t manufacture that.

As far as practical networking goes, I say yes to rooms where real relationships can happen. I go to writers’ rounds. I write with people. I support other artists. I talk to the person standing beside me instead of only looking for the most important person in the room. I’ve found that Nashville, especially, has a funny way of rewarding that because the person standing beside you whom you didn’t recognize may very well have written half the songs you grew up listening to.

My other advice is to follow up, but don’t chase. There is a difference between being intentional and trying to convince somebody to see your value. Send the email. Send the song. Say thank you. Keep the door open. Then go back to doing excellent work.

Some of the most important opportunities in my career have come from people watching what I was doing long before I knew they were watching.

So my approach is pretty simple: be good at what you do, be kind, be curious, show up, keep your word, support people when you don’t need anything from them, and don’t confuse access with relationship.

And maybe most importantly, don’t network “up.” Network across. Build genuine relationships with the people growing beside you. Today’s unknown songwriter, photographer, musician, producer, manager or artist may be tomorrow’s person everybody suddenly wants to know.

If you’ve treated them like they mattered all along, you won’t have to introduce yourself again.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.laurenmichaelsellers.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurenmichaelsellers/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laurenmichaelseller
• Twitter: https://x.com/lauren_michaelx
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@laurenmichaelsellers
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/laurenmichaelsellers
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@laurenmichaelsellers?lang=en