Singer-songwriter-pianist Rachael Yamagata will release “Starlit Alchemy,” her first new album since 2016’s “Tightrope Walker,” on October 3. The album is preceded by the single “Birds,” which will be officially released on Friday.
“‘Birds’ bears witness to the extra helping of ‘surreal’ one gets when navigating the craziness of the world we live in today in tandem with the grief of losing someone,” Yamagata says of the song. “The loneliness of both at the same time is profound, doubly unfair. The tonic lay in the signs we get telling us they’re still here…” Listen to the song below.
Yamagata first emerged in the early 2000s with her critically acclaimed debut “Happenstance,” and her music has evolved over the years, mostly recently outside the major label system. She has worked with a wide variety of artists including Liz Phair, Bright Eyes, Toots and the Maytals, Ray LaMontagne and others.
Yet after nine years, in October she returns with “Starlit Alchemy,” a “deep dive record,” as she describes it, intended to be heard in full. “I always knew it was going to be a one song-flows-into-the-next album,” she says. “The songs started as a compulsion to just express what I was going through and witnessing – only later did I realize the more cohesive story. It became a map made after the journey, not before. But it’s all in there.
Asked to describe the album, she says, “Perhaps think of Tom Waits as Willy Wonka and Ricki Lee Jones as Dorothy in a soundscape mentored by Hans Zimmer and Joni Mitchell – from her ‘Both Sides Now’ album. None of which I’m well versed in by the way, so forgive any pretense.”
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