Interview with Rachael Yamagata, by Laila Hanson

Ancestral-diverse songstress Rachael Yamagata exploded onto the singer-songwriter scene with her debut album Happenstance in 2004 and hasn’t stopped plucking her fingers over the piano keys and guitar strings since. The 31-year-old’s songs have appeared in shows like The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy and she’s lent her vocals to albums of fellow musicians Jason Mraz and Bright Eyes to name a few. The beauty has graced a spread in Rolling Stone magazine, garnered positive reviews from Spin, Blender and Billboard and is continuing to rack up favorable attention as she tours internationally. I was able to chat to her on the phone in May 2009 about her latest album [which came out in October 2008], a double-disc release that features two separate entities, Elephants and Teeth Sinking Into Heart.

Laila Hanson: Your new double album [Elephants...Teeth Sinking Into Heart] has been out 8 months now, how has it been promoting it?
Rachael Yamagata: Pretty good, actually. It came out in October, and I just got back from four weeks in Japan and Europe, and had a few more tours before that when it first came out. So we’re feeling really good, really excited. We have so many songs on our fingertips more and [are] playing with sets, and our international stuff was a blast, so it’s fun to kind of come back and have a fresh perspective on things, and it’s going really well so far.

LH: You had it packaged differently over in Japan, right?
RY: Yeah, in Japan they wanted it as one disc; I guess that’s how they do it. But it’s the same thing. From what I was told, they just weren’t going to release it as a double disc. And I don’t know if that’s only in my case, or if that’s indigenous to Japan. Japan always wants something different. We were adding extra tracks, and I wanted to change the sequence anyway. The artwork is still the same; it’s just one disc versus two.

LH: What got you to write a two-disc album like that? Did you write the two parts of it at separate points in your life?
RY: No, I didn’t expect to do it at first. We recorded everything at the same time, but it’s just based on a lot of experience, and my love of playing guitar; I tend to write my up-tempo songs on guitar. It [was] sort of giving me more material to choose from. When we went into the studio, they needed a way to make it very cinematic and very rich with strings and orchestral instruments. And with the guitar-driven songs, we kind of call it like a pulp-fiction, surf guitar. It was much more of a community experience, and we really wanted to stretch those songs to their full potential as well, and have the music narrate the lyrics. It just created this divide on a musical level, and that’s really why we wanted to treat it more like a Side A/Side B record situation versus a [solo] sequence. The live energy in a room is much more fun to improvise with, like in the moment with dynamics. But for the final experience for the listener, the final statement with how I wanted it to be heard, I really thought split ting them was a perfect mode. So it was really a thing that came about in the mixing process versus from the onset.

LH: How’d you hook up with Ray LaMontagne to do “Duet”?
RY: Well we had met several years ago; we were actually signed by the same person at RCA. So I always knew him and crisscrossed on the touring level, so it was kind of very organic to have him conducting the choice. There’s such a quality of emotion and sadness that I thought would be very complimentary and I’ve been on his records, and it was very natural to have him on mine, and it just worked.

LH: Have you thought about doing that song live at all and bringing him on tour with you for a date or two?
RY: I don’t think so, scheduling alone would be a pain [Laughs]. So I thought of just performing it solo, which kind of gives a different meaning to it as well. I don’t even know if we could beat it live, I really like the one take performance, I think that should be the last [of it] [Laughs].

LH: As far as touring compared to recording, do you like being in the studio and getting it all out, or do you like being able to express it on stage?
RY: You know, I kind of have a love/hate relationship with them both. Touring, I love to travel, I love the meeting new people aspect, always having a different town to explore, that’s everything I love about touring. Performing freaks me out, so I do have a bit of stage fright that I need to get myself out of every night, as well as loving those moments on stage where you’re riveting with people. You’re very much in control of the energy in the room, and also very much NOT in control of it; there’s something about that that really gives [you] a high. So it is a love/hate thing. Recording, I’m fascinated with that process and really interested in gear and projection and the potential, you can just do anything in the studio, it’s so intoxicating. But recording comes when it’s capturing what I hear in my head on tape. So of course, that’s a challenge. I don’t think I could give up live performance, but I certainly love being in the studio.

LH: You’ve done Bonnaroo and shows like that; do you tend to prefer big festival experiences or more club-type shows?
RY: They’re all different. The club shows you can be very [instrumental] in, because you’re in an enclosed room with a couple hundred people or a couple thousand people, there is an intimacy to it. A festival is a totally different ball game because you’ve got masses of people. If you want to play [like] a quintessential rocker, that’s the way to do it [Laughs]. There is this amazing [element] to it just because it’s so massive. But I do change my sets around for that situation. So I don’t love one over the other necessarily, I just thing that it’s apples and oranges.

LH: How long are you usually on the road before you think about writing again?
RY: It depends on where the songs are. This record took two years to get out, so I’ve been living with these songs for quite awhile in terms of where my writing head is at, I have this itch to kind of [let them] mature as well. So I think with this record, I’m feeling the itch a little bit sooner than I would have had I released it immediately when it was finished. But I think that you kind of have to follow your own inspiration. There are so many ways to play [songs] live and make them fresh for yourself, I think you could tour a record for years. Like I toured the first record [Happenstance] for two years and loved. So I think it just depends on the album cycle.


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