Michelle Brooke has taken a circuitous path to her current shelter place as a Nashville-based singer-songwriter who just released her first EP, "Let the Light In."

The Southfield-raised performer gravitated to music nearly from birth. Her father, retired Ob-Gynphysician Andrew Markowitz of Franklin, is a musician and still plays in the local group the Foster Brooks Band, and her parents played plenty of music around the house.

"There was nothing else I was ever interested in," says Brooke (nee Markowitz), who sang in the choir at Congregation Shaarey Zedeck synagogue and appeared in numerous musicals as a youth and a teenager at Walled Lake Central High School.

"My father is a guitarist. My mother sings around the house," she adds. "My grandparents were wildly obsessed with music. My mother's father was a violin player. My father's parents were huge music lovers. I was around my entire life, and that's all I wanted to do. I didnt want to focus in school I didn't think I would need any of it."

Walled Lake Central High School alumnus Michelle Brooke's new EP, "Let the Light In," came out April 10. (Cover provided by Michelle Brooke)

Brooke, who began writing songs as a teenager, did go to school, getting abachelor of fine arts degree at Central Michigan University before moving to New York. That, in turn, led to six years with Carnival Cruise Lines, "singing and dancing in Vegas-style revue shows" on the high seas.

"But I missed writing," Brooke recalls, which in 2016 led her to "make the leap to where the most talented people in the world come" and move to Nashville.

"I always say I'm scared and nervous about things, but I tend to run towards the fire cause I love to be challenged," Brooke says about heading to Music City. "It was intimidating, but I don't grow until I'm ... terrified. I had to figure out how to make my mark, to try to stand out and fit in at the same time."

Brooke found her place as part of the Music City Coppers house band at Acme Feed and Seed, which helped her build a community of supporters both other musicians as well as fans.

"I got really lucky and was brought into a network of people who are extremely kind and giving and believed in me," says Brooke, who was introduced to the venue by a former roommate, who was also from the Detroit area. Brooke also started singing at legendary venues such as the Bluebird Cafe and the Ryman Auditorium the latter as a backing vocalist for a multiartist benefit show and was featured on NPR's "She's a Rebel" program.

Brooke started co-writing with others around Nashville, and her break came with last year's "Storm," which she wrote with two fellow members of another band, Apollo LTD, and recorded at Sputnik Sound studio with producer Mitch Dane. The soulful single got some rave reviews. American Songwriter gushed that "her voice dazzles in the light of gospel and soul music," and it got some airplay on Nashville's Lightning 100. And it putin motion the "Let the Light In" EP, which came out April 10, funded through Kickstarter.

"I would say it all started with Motown," Brooke says of her sound, "with me falling in love with melodies, falling in love with Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. Being from Hitsville, it's definitely in my blood, but I take from musical theater as well."

Brooke also lists Sara Bareilles as a contemporary influence and adds that, "I'm a very theatrical and emotional person."

"I wear my heart on my sleeve. I'm not afraid to talk about things and say how I feel," she says. "But I have this fun, eccentric personality, too, so I want that to come through as well."

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Oakland County-born singer shines some "Light" in Nashville - The Oakland Press