Rachael Yamagata is part of a brand new song writing movement, and she doesn’t even know it

On her second album Elephants… Teeth Sinking into Heart, which was released this past October as a double disk, her vocals float like smoke barely whispered over swells of lush instruments. Strings enter and exit tastefully, hanging around just long enough to deliver a perfectly effecting phrase. Muted drums dot songs like the hushed rumblings of couples in a coffee shop. And, when it’s least expected, introspective tunes erupt into anthems of self-reliance, aided by militaristic percussion and searing guitars.

What sets her particular style apart isn’t the instrumentation or impeccable construction of her songs, which soar and retreat, hide and then pounce in all the right places. What stands apart are her lyrics, dark, haunting and often confrontational. On the album’s title track, “Elephants,” Yamagata explores a broken relationship, surveying the surrounding aftermath. Guided by sparse piano, she compares her damaged partnership to various wild animals. When her metaphor reaches tigers, she breaths:

      I am dreaming of them with their kill,

Tearing it all apart,

Blood dripping from their lips

And teeth sinking into heart

Traditionally, “singer songwriters” have been known as sensitive balladeers, a description that gained weight in the self-examining ’70s with artists like James Taylor, Cat Stevens and Carole King. Their songs confronted similar issues: heartbreak, stale relationships and the tug-of-war of modern love; though when they sang there was a light heartedness to most of their tunes. Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” might have been written about his battle with heroin, but summer campers could still harmonize to it around a roaring fire.

To put it differently, those songwriters didn’t sing quite so much about blood (that word, in its different incarnations, pops up seven times on Rachael’s new disk).

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The daughter of divorced parents, Yamagata split her time growing up between Washington, DC with her Japanese father and New York City with her German-Italian mother. Her favorite Beatle is a tossup between George and Paul and she has a special attachment to the Harrison tune “Something,” a track she heard dozens of times while driving cross country with her father from DC to California as a child.

Sitting near her garden in Philadelphia and casually chain-smoking Yamagata talks about her new record and the inspiration behind her lyrics. Though it’d be easy to interpret many of her songs as poisonous letters penned to ex-boyfriends, she explains that her words are often inspired by connections found on an unromantic, platonic level. “I certainly love a great heart-wrenching lyric,” she confesses, “but often times I’m not even specifically referencing a relationship… for me, it’s really all about the universal nature of just trying to relate to another person.”

With such a knack for injecting perfectly acerbic lines into her tracks, some of these songs must be about a particular heartthrob, a lost love that’s too meaningful or painful to disappear completely. She admits that some of her tunes contain slightly veiled messages that only the right listener would truly understand. “It’s kind of great in its own way,” she says. “It’s like a message to somebody – hidden meanings I suppose with a twist of a word.”

Yamagata’s most affecting songs, her most poisonous bites at love-worn partners, are directed not at the partner, but at the listener. On “What If I Leave” she sets a table for two, using her weary voice with brilliant skill to pull in the audience. When she casually begs the song’s title, the weighted question what if I leave is delivered quietly, with the destructive force of an emotional landmine.

She might be writing to an old lover, but she’s singing in a very real way to you. On “Sunday Afternoon,” a scorching eight-minute ballad, Yamagata circles her partner, accusing:

You have blood on your hands and I’m feeling faint

I’m a drug you don’t want to give up

You poured blood in my heart, I can’t get enough

I’m drowning and you can’t decide

In this tête-à-tête you are the indecisive lover in her headlights, and she is in the driver’s seat about to hit the gas. These aren’t touchy-feely folk songs. This is song writing with razorblades. Her style is extremely personal, sometimes violent, often confrontational, and frequently wonderful. Her contemporary, Ray LaMontagne, who appears on Yamagata’s song “Duet”, shares in her aggressive, vivid style, and together the two are spearheading a new offshoot of intimate song writing.

When asked if she’s given much thought to the use of perspective in her songs, Yamagata replies in the negative. “I’ve never really thought about it, I guess,” she says. “I like being direct versus kind of telling a story with a ‘he/she’ thing. When you’re romantically involved with someone the stakes are the highest they could possibly be, and you can show perhaps who you fully are at your most vulnerable.”

-Zachary Dinerstein