Interview: Rachael Yamagata - Page 2

In terms of the process — it's always been lyrics, melody, and music at the same time for me. That's still similar. I think maybe I've grown as a lyricist in terms of becoming a bit more poetic, using some imagery that I haven't used before.

Was it just for this album or do you normally set aside time and say, "I'm going to write now," as opposed to it being a part of everything else that you are doing?

No, I can't ever just sit down and say, "Now I'm going to write." It's very hard for me to write on tour, so the most I can hope for when I'm on the road is a phrase here or there that I'll revisit later. For this one, it was nine months of experimenting. It wasn't exactly like saying, "Now I'm going to write," because I had nine months. It was more that I gave myself space to write if I want to, and it came pouring out of me. I think it was the result of two years on the road and a crazy amount of stuff that I hadn't had a chance to process. I wrote around 160 songs at that time and fully demoed them. That was really great for me.

Since that record, I haven't written a song. I wrote a Christmas song for 2010 because I was feeling like I had to write something. I tried to sit down and write, and what I came out with was a Christmas song. I'm not really sure what the next round is going to be.

Ryan Adams has this process where he gets up every day and writes a song. I think that's amazing and disciplined, and probably exactly what I need to be doing. I haven't. I think I need a little bit of a mental break now because it took so long to get this record out. We'll see. I'm hoping that something comes soon.

What kind of reception have you been getting from your audience with this new record? It came out last fall and you've probably had a lot of time to play those songs for people and to get that out there.

We haven't done that many tours. I feel like we're on a roll now. We did a brief record release tour just before it was released, which is always a little tricky because people don't know the songs yet. Then I did a Hotel Cafe tour with five other female artists. That was an amazing tour, but challenging in terms of my stuff because of having only four songs a piece. It didn't feel like a full showcase of the new stuff because it was so limited. Then we did a quick run of seven dates in December. So, I still feel like I'm sinking my teeth into the touring aspects of it.

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