Michelle Branch

Five of her planets sit in fire signs and not one sits in earth, plus three in water and two more in air. Fire acts and water absorbs; nothing at all here holds a steady shape. Branch is an American singer and songwriter whose career began very young, which is the context for a chart with no grounding element in it: the steadying usually has to come from somewhere else, and in her case there was nowhere for it to come from.

The Sun sits at ten degrees of Cancer with Mercury and Mars close together near the start of the same sign. Cancer keeps everything it is given and takes all of it personally. Having identity, speech and drive together in that sign describes a songwriter whose material is her own circumstances rather than invented ones, delivered without much protective distance between the two.

Two T-squares run through this chart and both of them hold the Moon and Neptune, so private feeling is braced against the planet of image twice over with no outlet in either figure. The Moon is square Mercury at seven hundredths of a degree and square Mars at a fifth, both as tight as the arithmetic gets. Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were all retrograde when she was born. For a songwriter who began releasing records as a teenager, feeling braced twice against image with nowhere to put it is the condition the industry supplied.

Jupiter came back to where it began in Sagittarius on 18 November 2018, at thirty five, in reverse as it was originally. That is the planet of reach back in the sign it governs, the clearest run it gets, and Sagittarius counts distance covered rather than depth. Three circuits come before it, and a career that paused for most of the second is what the planet found waiting. Her Moon sits on the last degree of Pisces or the first of Aries, undetermined, and it is square Mercury either way, so the friction between feeling and speech holds whichever it turns out to be.