There’s a version of Michelle Bond’s story that most people never hear — the one that begins not with a stage, but with silence. Forty years of it.
Long before she became known as Michellar, the San Francisco-based singer-songwriter and visual artist was just a 15-year-old girl writing her first songs, shaped by a musically inclined family where her father played guitar and her mother sang. Music wasn’t a hobby back then — it was simply how the household spoke to each other.
But life, as it often does, pulled her in a different direction.
The Years in Between
For four decades, songwriting went quiet. In its place, Michelle built an entirely different creative life — one rooted in art and garden design. She became a respected landscape and garden designer in the Bay Area, channeling her creativity into color, form, and living spaces instead of melody and lyric. It was a full career, a full life — but somewhere underneath it, the songwriter never fully disappeared. She was simply waiting.
The Spark: De Young Museum, 2023
Every comeback story has a turning point, and for Michelle, it arrived in 2023. Her artwork was accepted into the De Young Museum’s Open Exhibition — a milestone that validated decades of visual artistry and, unexpectedly, cracked open a door she thought had closed long ago.
Seeing her paintings hung on museum walls did something unexpected: it reignited the songwriter inside her. If her art could hold that kind of power, she began to wonder, what could her music do?
Coming Home to Songwriting
What followed was not a slow return, but something closer to a flood. Michelle began writing again — and this time, with the perspective of someone who had lived a full life in between. Her songs carry a different kind of honesty now: the vulnerability of someone unafraid to say exactly what she means, shaped by influences like Carole King, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Andrew Lloyd Webber that she grew up loving.
Today, performing as Michellar, she plays her songs at open mics around her San Francisco neighborhood every week — the same intimate, unpolished setting where so many songwriters find their voice. Her music blends genres freely, moving between heartfelt folk, spiritual pop, and danceable anthems, but the throughline is always the same: emotional honesty.
As she puts it herself, songwriting has become her “most happy place… the place she calls home.”
Why This Story Matters
Michellar’s journey is a reminder that creative callings don’t always follow a straight line — and they don’t expire. A forty-year gap didn’t erase her connection to music; it simply gave her more to say when she finally returned to it. Every lyric she writes now carries the weight of a life fully lived — the landscapes she designed, the art she painted, the family she was raised in, and the silence she eventually broke.
For anyone who has ever set down a passion, believing it was gone for good, Michellar’s story offers a quiet but powerful truth: it’s never too late to come home to who you are.