Yamagata 'sinks teeth' into 9:30 club

as published in The Eagle Oct. 28, 2008

In a tiny dressing room upstairs at the 9:30 club, Rachael Yamagata sat on a counter, talking into her phone.

"Is that a good star rating?" she asked the caller. She listened for a moment and then said "That's a good sentence."

Reviews are still coming in on Yamagata's latest album, "Elephants ... Teeth Sinking Into Heart," but so far many have praised the veteran songstress for her lush harmonies and complex instrumentation.

Yamagata said she wrote the album on a keyboard, testing out the programmed sounds to create

 tones that would later become violins, oboes and cellos. Once she took the demos to 

an arranger, it became a challenge to bring the album to life with an orchestra.

"I thought about what supplied the right texture," she said. "I didn't think about how we'd reproduce it ... making the music mirror that lusciousness."

But Yamagata didn't need to worry about her newest songs translating well in a live setting. During her performance at 9:30 Oct. 28, she performed several tracks from the album that met audience approval. Along with Hotel Café tourmates Samantha Crain, Thao Nguyen, Jenny Owen Youngs and Meiko, Yamagata brought enough energy and charisma to ensure the audience had a unique and enjoyable evening.

Though no one performer headlined the Hotel Café Tour, the crowd clearly favored Yamagata, eager to respond to her between-song banter. Though she has been performing professionally for eight years, Yamagata's set resounded with a sense of maturity that most of the other performers couldn't quite match. 

Yamagata's main exposure to music came through performing in musicals at the girls' school she attended in Bethesda, Md.

"I didn't go out to see music," she said. Between practices for volleyball, softball, cross-country, track and play rehearsals, she had no time to attend concerts.

But studying theater in Chicago introduced Yamagata to her true calling - music. She followed a local band around until they finally let her join them as a vocalist.

"Music took over," she said. "I lost sense of time doing it. Being in a band, it became clear my passion was songwriting."

Relationships are the most common topic in Yamagata's writing. "Elephants ... Teeth Sinking Into Heart" is almost entirely focused on examining love and the aftermath of relationships through a myriad of lenses. Even though Yamagata is currently in a successful relationship, she doesn't think she'll ever lack relationship-based material.

"I'm never content," she said of her romances. Even when happy in a relationship, Yamagata added, issues and observations always pop up to create new tension and keep her writing.

But just because she's happy now doesn't mean she's not bitter about the past.

"If you've ever had anything end badly, then you are my soul mate," she told the audience before playing her last song of the evening.

But the final song hit a few snags when she forgot the lyrics to "Reason Why."

"Sing it for me," Yamagata told the audience as she kept playing, laughing and blaming the missed words on the alcohol she drank to calm her nerves. "You'll remember this," she promised at the end of the song, before exiting to the audience's enthusiastic applause - proving that once again, Yamagata didn't have anything to worry about.

Selling Your Soul One Video at a Time

Weekends are generally spent watching TV, eating ice cream or reading a trashy romance novel.

But instead of comfort foods and mindless entertainment, I slummed my weary self up to the second floor MGC to talk to students I'd never met to talk about - go figure - mindless entertainment.

Of course, I mean YouTube. Friend of the procrastinator everywhere, home for water skiing squirrels and... an anthropological study on the newest form of communication on the web?

A study presented by John Wesch of Kansas State University at the Library of Congress argued that YouTube was a mirror for our culture and opened new lines of communication through webcams that would change the way our society related to each other.

But the students at American University disagreed, citing YouTube as entertainment that could have possible side effects of legit communication, but entertainment, none the less.

Almost all the students noted that instead of falling into the black hole of YouTube, they more often only visited the site when sent a link or when looking up a specific clip, averaging only five or ten minutes per visit.

This selective exposure to YouTube undermines what seems to be the popular cultural idea that YouTube is where college students and young professionals head when they've got nothing else to do - but that honor is really delegated to Facebook.

Out of the six students I interviewed, only one had uploaded his own content to YouTube (a video of him dancing in his dorm hall to "Since U Been Gone" by Kelly Clarkson), and all of them spoke of video blogging with the distinct tone of pity and disgust that one might use when describing road kill. Video blogs were the product of attention-seeking, fake people, and they would never be caught dead pimping themselves for their webcam.

Another perception demolished.

So even though my weekend didn't entail the customary sugar and SVU marathon, it did facilitate smashing the academic views of YouTube, bringing it down to the level of the average Joe-the-College-Student, which is pretty cool.