BY KATE HEINZELMAN

hile I'm trying to choose a major, Michal Towber, CC '05, is busy picking a title for her new album. Maybe "Curve, or Heroine Honeymoon, or," she laughs, "just, Album." Signed by RPM Records at age 17, Michal is practically a veteran to the business. Her last album, Sky with Stars, won a place on the Dawson's Creek soundtrack and plenty of press—including a feature in Stuff Magazine. Her song "Tissue Paper Wings," part of the score for One Life to Live, is now up for an Emmy. Her upcoming album—which, she assures me, features some very exciting musicians, including a few from Alanis Morisette's band—will be released by Columbia Records this summer.

Michal's story is pretty extraordinary. While Morisette and Joan Osborne were making their entrances onto the music scene, so was 13-year-old Miki—hanging out at open mics and playing at places like the Mercury Lounge in downtown Manhattan, miles away from her Upper East Side high school. "I was very focused on what I was doing in high school...to the point where I really wasn't open to anybody who didn't like Nirvana or wear ripped up jeans like me. So I would like to not make that exclusively my identity anymore. I just think it sucks to be a one-faceted person."

One-faceted she is not. Since coming to Yale after a three-year hiatus to work on her music and promote her first album, Michal has made quite a splash. Rowing crew, trying the premed track, singing in Magevet, and now rehearsing for this spring's productions of Candide and Jesus Christ Superstar, Miki protests she's "not like a Renaissance person." The rest of us may disagree. When does she write her music? She just doesn't sleep.

One has to wonder what it is like to be a 21-year-old freshman who already knows what she wants to do. "My attitude is kind of different from a lot of people here," she explains. "I was surprised by the number of virgins here, you know...not even virgins but people who've never been kissed before." While not exactly jumping at the chance to do keg stands, Michal was certain about the fact that she wanted to go to school. "I saw what it was not to have a college education and to have to support yourself. I mean, I belly danced in a company for two years because I needed money."

While she's spent much of her life performing, Michal is still wary of exposing herself to scrutiny: "I switched from classical music to rock music because I didn't want to mutilate somebody else's work," she explains. "When you're playing a Beethoven sonata and you're interpreting it badly, then you are going to be realizing it as less than what it was meant to be. For me, playing my own music is my way to be as sloppy—and as cryptic—as I want."

However, Michal's music has certainly changed. Now, she says, her songs are more directly autobiographical. She describes her new album as having "a bluesy retro sound to it." In fact, it was only after being haunted by Patsy Cline's "Crazy" that Michal wrote the song about which she is most proud, one "just about being head over heels in love."

Despite all of her early success, Michal is trying to steer away from the path of the starving artist. "I can do without cleaning up people's floors and making $20 a night," she says, laughing. "You know, I'm over that." One's thing's for sure-she's a talented woman who, despite all of the options she's had, refuses to look back. "I think that everything happens for a reason," she says. And as for her music, she says, "There's no other way that I'll ever be eloquent at expressing myself."