When singer/songwriter Rachael Yamagata was growing up, she went to all-girls school that she says warped her into the relationship-obsessed woman she’s become, at least in the lyrics of her songs. She began singing with a funk-crazed dance band called Bumpus while she was in college studying theater. While touring and recording with Bumpus, she was also writing confessional, deeply emotional songs that didn’t fit the band’s format. Happenstance, her first solo album, was a folk/pop charmer. Her tunes have appeared on The O.C., The L Word, Grey’s Anatomy and Alias, and Ray LaMontagne, Ryan Adams and Conor Oberst all expressed admiration for her vocal style. Having just issued Chesapeake (Frankenfish), Yamagata will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with her.
Yamagata: Some songs just do it for you, and this one of them for me. I am a self proclaimed “romantic” and a sucker for the darker sorrow of situations, and this one speaks to my heartstrings. Paul Simon‘s “Still Crazy After All These Years”—I had my first kiss to this one in the basement of he knows who next to the pool table and just at the crescendo of the sax solo. Later it would have a deeper significance in a longer relationship and we’d spin it on the jukebox at the bar as a sort of wink to each other. How many songs can use the lyric “Four in the morning, crapped out, yawning/Longing my life away” over one of the most unexpected chord progressions ever, hitting this note that just lifts you. And the whole thing feels just easy. (I’m a terrible critic, but trust me on this one.) I hear this song and I think of winter, of college, of The Breakup when they see each other at the end and have both moved on, but you see the love that’s transformed into something bittersweet in their eyes. Go Jen and Vince—nice scene. Crushed me. The whole thing reminds me of the one that got away—the person who was so fun and outrageous and yet somehow it all just blew up in our faces—that kind of sorrow. You look back fondly and can’t get too close to it because if you did you could really go off the deep end in the why-didn’t-it-work-out zone. It’s one of those songs that hits so hard and true that makes me sure I’ll never be entirely comfortable when exes get together for coffee or “drank ourselves some beers, still crazy after all these years.” Reading the lyrics, it’s almost simple and so concise—not fussed over, which means it was probably totally fussed over or else really quickly written and delivered as a gift. Anyway, take a listen.
Video after the jump.
