Catching Up With... Rachael Yamagata

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From the outside, it might seem like Rachael Yamagata has developed a split personality since the release of her debut record. The smoky-voiced, raven-haired singer/songwriter's much-delayed sophomore release, Elephants...Teeth Sinking Into Heart, is a 14 track double album (featuring a hidden song). The first disk is composed of atmospheric, elegiac and emotionally naked tales of lovelorn relationships. The second disk is louder and livelier, brimming with hot-boiled angst so much so the album has been slapped with a parental advisory sticker.

But Yamagata says both sides represent her sonically as well as personally. Having emerged relatively unscathed after being dropped by her record label RCA (and subsequently signing to Warner Bros.), Yamagata has finally seen the release of an album in the works for over two years. That liberation has afforded Yamagata to refine her sound in a way some might find surprising since 2004's Happenstance, a record that earned her a spot as one of our 4 to Watch emerging artists. We recently caught up with Yamagata to talk about her album, Elephants...Teeth Sinking Into Heart, the laborious process it took to get it into stores, and how a prediction a psychic made years ago just recently came to fruition.

Paste: This is your first album in four years. It seems to cover wildly diverse terrain. It is two discs. There are two songs over eight minutes. Were you trying to make a statement with this record at all?
Rachael Yamagata: No, not really. Nothing other than doing something that was really uncensored and personal and unrestricted. I guess in terms of the lengthiness of some of the songs, I don't really think in typical songwriting structure at times. They were two spontaneous writing experiences for me. One of them, "Sunday Afternoon," doesn't even really have an established chorus. It all just flowed when I was writing and we got the production to compliment that. But there was no conscious, "I will make a long song" when I was doing it.

Paste: And why the two discs?
Yamagata: The two-part issue was really something that presented itself midway through recording. I didn't set out to do a split disk, or as some people are calling it a 'concept record.' It was more of a result of trying to keep things inspired and letting songs go wherever they seemed to want to go. The rock songs were kind of biting. They deserved music that was raw, guttural, and passionate and unrefined in a way. And then on the other side of things, the beautiful stuff just lent itself to lush arrangements, the lyrics are darker and perhaps more poetic. Midway toward the end, it was becoming two distinct vibes and sounds and that's what led to the split - presenting them as "halves" versus trying to interrupt the vibe by interjecting a rock song into the more beautiful sequence.

Paste: You actually mentioned one of the my follow-up questions earlier with the phrase "concept album." What do you feel about that phrase, because I'm sure artists don't like it when the press tries to pigeonhole an album into or word or two.
Yamagata: I kind of feel like I would love to actually sit down and do a concept record. I don't feel like this one is so much because thematically and musically it's coming from two different places. The Counting Crows just did Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings. I love that idea, and to me that seems like a deliberate artistic statement. I'd love to actually do that, or write a concept album about traveling, or one particular relationship or something like that. I think that's interesting. I don't mind the coining of the phrase so much, but because it wasn't so intentional, I'm thinking it's not accurate for this record.

Paste: What's the significance of calling the first part of the album Elephant? A metaphor for elephant in the room perhaps?
Yamagata: It was very much a channeled lyric. I had no association with elephants beforehand. I actually got a card that had pictures of elephants on it from an ex-boyfriend. It was a trying time in our relationship. And this card was sent and he would always talk of elephants having these incredible memories and that they never forget anything. Somehow that stayed with me.

When the song "Elephants" came about, I was running one day and all of these animal metaphors came. When I was finished with it and went back and studied the lyric, I saw it as a metaphor for setting up the whole record. There is a truth to relating animals to having distinctive reactions toward their experience and how they're treated. There's no black-and-white clouding or intellectual thought in it necessarily, it's very instinctual. I liked that idea of relating that to human behavior. I really feel like on some unconscious level we do the same thing; we go through these painful things and it affects us on a really deep level and even if we can rationalize ourselves out of it later, there's this danger of being affected for life. It ended up working as this great metaphor to set up the rest of songs on the first half of the record, but again that wasn't intentional. I'm sorry you'll have to excuse me, I have had like eight cups of coffee, I'm really long-winded.

Paste: [laughs] I'm sure to be able to get through all of these interviews you would need to be hyped up on caffeine, so I won't hold it against you.
Yamagata: Well, thanks.