Rachael Yamagata had been writing music in solitude for several years, too shy to show her compositions to anyone.
While she was still with the Chicago-based funk band Bumpus, she finally got up the nerve to let her bandmates hear what she’d been up to — and was greeted with Simon Cowell-like comments by a few of them.
“The initial reaction that I took away was it was no good, it was too dark or sad or whatever it is,” says the soft-spoken Yamagata as she recalls the moment. “I kind of went back into a shell after that experience, because that’s what you do when you’re showing it initially and you doubt yourself. I really didn’t show those songs to anybody for five years.”
But she didn’t stop writing, nor did she change her writing style. Now, the same songs that drew derision have now made Yamagata one of this year’s most heralded new artists, and garnered her comparisons to Norah Jones for her piano-driven, emotive songs.
The striking, raven-haired Yamagata isn’t the only female singer-songwriter drawing comparisons to the folky jazz singer. Since the unexpected success of Jones’ 2002 debut album, “Come Away With Me,” women with an acoustic, artistic bent are in vogue. Over the last year, highly touted releases from Jem, Nellie McKay, Maria Mena, Charlotte Martin, Katie Meleau and a few others have made their way to record stores.
Riding the Norah Jones waveMartin, a classically trained singer-pianist whose self-titled album was released this summer, had been signed to RCA for years, but says previous record company executives “didn’t know what to do with me.”
She thinks it helps that Jones achieved such success “just because she’s a woman, because there’s not a lot of females in this business who ... write serious music.”
Meleau, a guitar-strumming pop singer who has become a sensation in Britain and released her debut album in the United States earlier this year, agrees: “She kind of opened the door, and the door is wide open for loads of people now.”
However, she adds: “It was also hard because you get a lot comparisons. I totally love what she does, but I think our music is very much different.”
Yamagata, 27, who has also been compared to the fiery Fiona Apple, echoes the same sentiment.
“I think it opens a huge door on the one hand, and then you run the danger of if you get that comparison: ‘Well, there’s already another Norah Jones out there,”’ she says. “(But) I think she really helped on the label side because it showed that it could be successful and commercial to have something so beautiful and stark out there.”
Haunting melodies, eclectic prose
Beautiful and stark are words that could be used to describe Yamagata’s debut album, “Happenstance.” Released over the summer, it deals with the kind of angst typically mined for songs — painful breakups, unrequited love and moments of helplessness and despair; but her eclectic prose, haunting melodies and her alluring vocal delivery has distinguished her from the flock of also-ran performers.
“It’s a tricky time because I think that the market can get saturated with a certain genre of music, but I think that everybody has something very unique to them,” Yamagata says. “I think that just as a basic solo artist, the trick will be to stand out amongst a lot of other solo singer-songwriter artists.”
Yamagata seems to have already mastered the trick.
“She did this outdoor show where it was just her and a piano, and she’s powerful. She’s Norah Jones almost with her rocket boosters on,” says Anne Litt, who hosts “Weekend Becomes Eclectic” on Los Angeles area public radio station KCRW-FM. “She has that X-factor that makes her a little bit more grittier, a little bit more thought-provoking and a little bit sassier.”
Becoming a solo singer wasn’t part of Yamagata’s original plan; in fact, she hadn’t intended on becoming a singer at all. As a child, she took piano and flute lessons as she divided time between her divorced parents’ homes in the Washington, D.C. area and upstate New York. Later, while attending Northwestern University in Chicago, she studied theater with the intent of being an actress. However, she found that acting wasn’t the best way to express herself.
“I got kicked out of acting class,” says Yamagata. “I just shouldn’t have been in school, in general.”
Drifting into musicAlthough she did end up graduating, she found herself drifting to music, and, more specifically, one group: Bumpus, whose energetic performances and soul-based grooves had already made them an in-demand band.
“The chemistry that they had, they could just take over a room, and you couldn’t look away,” she recalls. “I’d trail them a lot, and I’d go to practices just to kind of be around and learn, and I would bring them coffee.”
Yamagata eventually became a background singer and later, when a lead singer dropped out, assumed that position. But as time went on, she became more transfixed by her own music than the band’s.
“For me, at some point down the line down the line I just felt exhausted because I had this other wealth of material that was kind of sitting around doing nothing, and I felt like I needed to do it, at least at open mike or something, just to get it out there and feel creative.”
While she gave up her gig with Bumpus, she gained much more — a record contract with Bluebird, a small label that’s part of the BMG conglomerate.
While sales of her debut CD has been modest, Yamagata says her music — along with that of her new contemporaries — shows there’s an enduring market for soft, soul-searching music by someone other than Norah Jones.