Hotel Café Tour: Rachael Yamagata

By Naila Francis
Published: October 31st, 2008 | 12:00pm

"One bus, one band and a bunch of friends on the road." It's the tag line to what has become one of the most successful singer-songwriter tours of the last few years. And this time around, the Hotel Café Tour is giving it up to the women. Launched by that now venerable Hollywood venue with a reputation for breaking new talent, the tour has been throwing together headliners and local emerging singer-songwriters for the last four years, showcasing their music as much as the convivial atmosphere that the café is known for on jaunts across the United States and the United Kingdom. This year's tour, kicking off October 9 in Santa Barbara, California, features 18 of the most promising new female voices (including a few familiar favorites) to hit their stage in recent times.

"There are so many tours where it's a bunch of guys and this was an opportunity to show an area where females are dominating the current market," says tour co-founder Josh Neuman. "We wanted to bring diverse artists together from many different cultural and musical backgrounds. It's always exciting to see how people will get along out there and what collaborations come from it."

In this series running throughout the duration of the tour, which concludes November 18 in Los Angeles (check thehotelcafetour.com for dates, tickets, and more on the featured artists at each venue), Venuszine.com puts the spotlight on the women who've caught our ear and the reasons we think you should tune in to them, too.

Rachael Yamagata

Age: 30-something

Home base: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Pick up: Elephants …Teeth Sinking Into Heart, her October 7, 2008, release on Warner Bros. Records

Sound: Stark lyrical confessions draped in a cinematic lushness and fired with an edgy rock defiance

Double-shot disc: Yamagata’s new album, while a single record, is actually in two parts: the first nine tracks exposing a darker vulnerability as she negotiates the complex, rocky terrain of crumbling relationships, the last five revealing a woman finding strength and renewed optimism in her loss, even as she gives as good as she gets. “With the first sequence, ‘Elephants,’ there’s just enough lift and sinking qualities to it, not a monotonous vibe, but all the songs are definitely in that same vein. It does have a darker quality to it. It’s very heavy but also very beautiful,” she says. “And then ‘Teeth Sinking into Heart,’ you can go to that one for a defiant, authentic, in-your-face experience.”

No sadsack here: Despite what many have come to think about her music, Yamagata says “Elephants …Teeth Sinking Into Heart” is not intended to invite brooding melancholy. “‘Elephants’ is not cynical, it’s not downtrodden in a victim sense,” says the singer-songwriter, who jokes that she should follow her performances with coffee chats that stress her lyrics as a path to self-awareness. “It is exploratory and internal, kind of life-assessing and wiser in that I’m looking toward my own circumstances rather than external changes and situations. The second half is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, sassy in a way. I have the ability to be vulnerable and open to that and I have the ability to be independent and strong and to not play mind games but reclaim my boundaries.”

Going for guitar: Although Yamagata makes no claims to being dazzlingly proficient on guitar, it’s what she’s always written her songs on. And while her keyboard prowess took center stage on her full-length debut “Happenstance,” “Elephants …Teeth Sinking Into Heart” is a more guitar-driven disc. “The piano has a weighted emotion to it tonally. It’s very tangible, visceral — you can sink into it and change the tone,” she says. “But I also love the loud, rocking, trance-like quality of playing guitar.”

Animal inspiration: “I like setting up the record with a song that bridges that gap between humans and animals,” says Yamagata, of the opening “Elephants,” which also contains references to hawks and tigers and speaks to the battle for self-preservation in the face of an old love’s return. “There’s something so pure about an animal’s reaction. There are no shades of gray. I kind of feel that at our deepest core, we’re similar; we can rationalize it, and analyze it, and create our own shades of gray, but at the core, there’s just kind and not kind.”

A tradition revived?: “It’s going to be a mini Lilith Fair or something,” says Yamagata of the Hotel Café Tour. “I love [tours like this]. They’re just really fun …. Meiko, and Priscilla [Ahn], and Kate [Havnevik] — we’ve all played shows together and been on mini tours together. They’re super-super girls.”

Rachael Yamagata MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/rachaelyamagata