Rachael Yamagata

From childhood onward, singer and songwriter Rachael Yamagata absorbed the sounds of Carole King, Roberta Flack, James Taylor, and comparable artists because music alone supplied unbroken continuity through her formative years. When her parents divorced at her age of two, she learned to split time between her German-Italian mother’s New York City apartment and the Washington, D.C. home of her third-generation Japanese father. Those repeated journeys prepared her for the itinerant existence that later supported a professional singing path.

Midway through the 1990s she arrived at Northwestern University already equipped with a single year of piano study and a notebook crowded with original songs. After completing one year of a French degree, she moved to New York and enrolled as an Italian theater major at Vassar. Further upheaval followed when her acting coach transferred to Barnard College; Yamagata considered following yet ultimately returned to Northwestern, entered its theater program, and, during her junior year, formed a friendship with the funk band Bumpus.

Bumpus maintained a steady presence on Chicago’s club circuit, and Yamagata soon joined as vocalist. Over the next six years she contributed to three albums and crisscrossed the country on tour. By 2001 she sensed the collaboration had reached its limit; a collection of songs unsuited to the group’s funk-driven approach prompted her to begin a solo career.

In September 2002 she signed with Arista’s Private Music imprint, and her self-titled EP appeared the following month. The debut full-length album, Happenstance, arrived in June 2004. John Alagía, previously at the helm of John Mayer’s Room for Squares and Dave Matthews Band’s Busted Stuff, shaped its pop-inflected sound, which subsequently appeared on youth-oriented series such as The O.C. and Alias. The record also drew the attention of Ray LaMontagne, Jason Mraz, Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst, and Rhett Miller, each of whom later featured Yamagata on their own projects while she prepared her second album.

That support underpinned the 2008 release Elephants...Teeth Sinking into Heart, an eclectic set that juxtaposed intimate songs with rock passages recalling PJ Harvey. Yamagata turned to the crowdfunding platform PledgeMusic to finance her third album, the relaxed Chesapeake, issued in 2011, and again in 2016 to support the much-awaited Tightrope Walker.