Yamagata’s mountain inspiration

Secluding herself on a family-owned wooded property in Woodstock, N.Y., singer-songwriter-pianist Rachael Yamagata found her muse during a run down a mountain. Upon completing the run back up, a new song came to mind — Elephants — that ultimately set the tone for her latest two-CD effort, Elephants … Teeth Sinking Into Heart.

“I was there to get over a thousand things that had happened to me, but mainly a relationship breakup that really floored me,” the Virginia-born, Philadelphia-based 31-year-old tells Metro. “This guy I was seeing sent me this card with elephants on it — the idea being that elephants never forget — and the phrase in the card said something like, ‘Now let’s just forget our relationship and not give up hope.’ I had that on my mind as I went for a run to re-energize.”

The follow-up to Yamagata’s 2004 full-length debut, Happenstance, initially had been completed in mid-2007. But a change in management and a subsequent drop from parent label RCA put Elephants … in limbo. (Warner eventually signed her.) That, combined with the aforementioned breakup, the death of her stepmom and a Dominican Republic vacation whereupon she damaged an eardrum while deep-sea diving drove Yamagata to yearn for practically no human contact by the time she arrived in Woodstock.

“Writing (about 160 songs) in the middle of the woods up at weird hours like 4 a.m. with all these weird circumstances going on mixed in with this weird isolation, brought out songs in a style I’ve never written before,” Yamagata says.

After “about 80 attempts to sequence the album,” she finally decided to issue a so-described ‘record in two parts.’ For the hushed 10-song first disc, Yamagata explains, “I wanted this extra-intimate, whispery vibe that got increasingly lush with the addition of strings and such — there was something very cinematic about the whole thing.”

For the loud, up-tempo five-song second disc, she adds, “I had all these rock-driven songs, very biting, gritty lyrics but with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour about it all, no sugarcoating whatsoever.”