If you ever pull up Apple Maps for directions to a concert venue and Rachael Yamagata also appears to be nearby, don’t curse Cupertino’s hilariously glitchy app. Odds are good that the 35-year-old singer-songwriter really is a stone’s throw from a stage at any moment. After touring last fall in support of her third album, the self-released Chesapeake, she hit the road again in the spring. In September, she headed up a residency at New York’s Rockwood Music Hall with some of her musical pals. Now, after enjoying about a month’s rest, Yamagata is kicking off a monthlong North American tour.

Grabbing some time with Yamagata before she started packing, I asked about plans for her latest string of dates and the new EP she’s put together for the occasion, Heavyweight, produced by John Alagía (Chesapeake, Happenstance) and Mike Viola. We also chatted about choosing singles, cover songs, and our shared obsession with HGTV.

POPSERVATIONS: So, Rachael, you’re heading out on tour again. What can fans expect this time out?

RACHAEL YAMAGATA: “It’s going to be almost like an ‘Evening with’ type show. I’ve done tours with several different formations before. For a number of runs, I’ve done the full rock show with a big band, and last time I did sort of a trio style. This time is more focused on the ballad side of my songs, the cinematic, kind of dreamy set, so I’m bringing violin and a cellist. There are a lot of songs that I’m choosing that showcase strings. It’s gonna be stripped-down in the respect that it won’t be the rock show, it’ll be a bit more centered around my vocal and the lyrics. A starker beauty, without being naked, I guess.” (Laughs.)

That might be a draw.

“Yes, stark beauty, almost naked. Someone will be unclothed!”

Could be a good name for the tour.

“Exactly, the Stark Naked Tour! But yeah, that will be sort of the vibe. I’ve tried to figure out how to seat venues, which I always feel is a different experience for a show if you’re sitting down versus standing. It’s a little bit of an experiment, but it’s something I’ve been curious about. Because I’ll play the full band shows and then I’ll do one or two solo songs and the energy is really vulnerable, so I’ve wondered what would it be like to capture a whole set like that.”

Did your recent New York residency influence the approach to the new tour? The time of year?

“The residency brought me back to how great that kind of show can be, how the storyteller vibe can be. So that was certainly part of it. The strings I’ve been missing for a while, so I’ve been thinking about how do I work those back into it, because I’m such a big fan of that in the production when I’m recording a song and there’s just nothing like it live. And this past record and this new EP have a lot of background vocals so I was like, how do I represent these harmonies a little bit better, what combination can I do there, so it’s like a puzzle piece every time I go out how I’m going to structure it. And it seemed perfect for the cold fall weather. I hope it works — we’ll see! I think it’ll be good!”

Tell me about your new EP, Heavyweight.

“It’s a collection of six songs I recorded last year. Two of the songs have already been released internationally but we remastered them and weaved them into this new collection of other songs. My last record, Chesapeake, had a lot of more uptempo tunes on it and a couple of [humorous] ones, so this is my answer to people who were missing the dark side a little bit.” (Laughs.)

The troubador of the lovelorn.

“Exactly! Which is always where my heart probably lies. People are like, ‘Where’s the sad stuff?’ You write a bunch of songs at the end of a record when you’re already on this path of a recording or the studio time, and you’re like, ‘Why didn’t I write that in time? That would have been great!’ These are some of those songs where the ideas were just brewing as I was ending in the studio last time with Chesapeake.”

Where did the title “Heavyweight” come from?

“‘Heavyweight’ is the first song on the EP, and was this idea that I kept playing with when I was living in Philadelphia, which is, of course, big on Rocky Balboa. I’m strangely obsessed with Rocky and would run the Ben Franklin Bridge listening to Rocky soundtracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 — it’s actually really good running music! So I always had this fascination with that underdog story, and I had been thinking about this particular relationship where we just couldn’t connect. All we ever did was fight. So the theme of boxers was always in my head surrounding this person. 

One day, the word ‘heavyweight’ came to me — I was probably watching Rocky again — and I just thought that was really an amazing word because of the double meanings. The heavyweight boxer champion and then that heavy weight of needing to have that front all the time to your public persona, the weight of having to keep that up, and can’t you just be vulnerable and why can’t I connect with you… So it had a lot of different meanings for me. It seemed like a good title for this, especially because it’s a little EP, it’s got six songs, so I got a kick out of using such a heavy word for something that’s only six songs.”

I read that Liz Phair is on it.

“She is. The second song is called, “Has It Happened Yet,” which was something that I had written in several forms — on guitar, on piano, I was doing it myself, I made it into a duet, I thought it was going to be a guy and girl. I didn’t think we were going to record it, but I really loved the idea of it. We were hanging out in L.A. at John’s studio and all the girls came over — Madi Diaz was there, who I toured with, she’s a sweetheart, and Liz Phair was there, who took me out on tour several years ago. And we all sat down and jammed after dinner. So that’s Liz on electric guitar, and Madi’s playing some whirly. I think we had one mic on the drums, the snare and a kick drum. Everything was super-fast and very unthought. You can hear us giggling at the very end if you listen. We’re laughing and we’re making mistakes all over the place but there’s a real charm to it. So yeah, she’s on that one.”

That experience seems to indicate you’ve got a much more relaxed approach to recording these days.

“That’s definitely true. It’s the ability to be able to record and know that I can release it because there’s nothing stopping me. There’s a big freedom of thought there. For years, it’s been, “Who’s still around at the label? Okay, what kind of experiment do I have to do now?” It wasn’t tragically bad, the way that a lot of artists go through, but it was bad enough where I wasn’t getting records out.”

It was, what, four years between albums one and two…

“Four years between both of them! Happenstance in 2004, Elephants in 2008, and Chesapeake at the end of 2011. Which is ridiculous! I want to keep writing and put it out quickly, so just to be able to do that now is so refreshing. The pressure’s off. Fans will love you or they won’t, but as long as you stay true to yourself at least there’s nobody in the middle affecting it.”

Running your own label now (Frankenfish Records) with nobody in the middle, as you say, tell me how you choose which songs should be singles.

“For this one [Heavyweight], in terms of a single, I don’t know that there are any. (Laughs.) If we’re talking radio, it’s gonna be late night, ‘Don’t kill yourself, I’m here on the air with you.’ It’ll be that kind of single! But I always like using the crowd’s response, the people who are hearing you play it, because you can get definitely get a better gauge on things. Sometimes when you’re tracking a song you know instantly that it has something and you remember that. Sometimes when I’m writing something there are occasional moments when I get chills or I’ll tear up or something. It sounds super self-indulgent, but it’s more of like a signal that, ‘Wow, I know in my whole body that I just said the exact line with the right melody that totally captures what I wanted to express.’ And those are the songs that start to seem like they would be the front runners.”

One of my favorite non-singles from Chesapeake is “You Won’t Let Me.”

“I wrote that with my friend, Mike Viola, who is an amazing writer. He’s one of the only people I can actually co-write with and I’ll release the songs because they still feel like me. We wrote that on guitar first, sitting on top of a roof in Venice Beach looking at the water. I was at the tail end of a relationship and we were philosophically discussing what it’s like to see how something could work with somebody if only they just stepped two steps over here versus two steps over there. You literally can visualize and have all these ideas about how something can work with somebody, and the only thing standing in the way is they just won’t let you do all these things. They won’t receive the love, whether they’re not capable or whatever, and it’s so frustrating because it’s not like, ‘I don’t love you, you don’t love me,’ it’s that ‘You’re literally sabotaging this, you’re not letting me show you how I can make everything better.’ Of course you can’t have a relationship thinking that way. That’s not a relationship! (Laughs.) There really is another person and they get to do whatever they want to do. But that frustration is a pretty universal feeling that people have in relationships that just don’t make it when you really, really want them to.

Mike’s a great editor for me. He really will not let me get away with something that isn’t concise. So when we finally got that line, ‘But you won’t let me,’ we were so happy — ‘Yes! That’s it! It’s so simple, but it says everything!’ The really funny thing is that when we finished it, I had it on my iPod, and I’m walking out at sunset, nobody’s around, I’m gonna sit by the water and have my first listen. I’m sitting there, and I’m loving it, and I’m tearing up because it’s moving me, and I see this thing in the waves coming straight towards me. And this dead baby whale washes up directly in front of me as I’m listening to this song for the first time! It’s literally at my feet, not a mile down the beach. (Laughs) This thing comes straight at me as I’m listening to the song. I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know if this is a really good sign or a really bad sign, but there’s something about this song!'”

Besides releasing Chesapeake last year, you were also involved in recording some cover songs, including “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday” for Muppets: The Green Album.

“That was another song that Mike Viola produced. That was super-exciting. I remembered that song from my childhood, but when I really listened to the lyrics and it registered what a sad song it is, I was like, ‘I can totally bring something to this.’ And it felt like something that I connected with and that’s what made it the right choice for me. It felt cinematic, it felt nostalgic and sad, and all of those great things.”

You also contributed vocals to Duncan Sheik’s Covers ’80s album. He said that the litmus test for picking songs was whether he really cared about them when he was 15 or 16. If you were to tackle a similar project, what artists or songs would make the cut?

“I actually have a covers EP that I’m going to release early next year, and on that is the 10cc song, “I’m Not In Love.” I’ve always loved that one. And Janis Ian, ‘At Seventeen,’ I was obsessed with that song. I saw her play it, I think she was the first musical guest on Saturday Night Live in the ’70s and I was blown away. We’ve done a Bruce Springsteen song, another writer who I think is amazing. I’m still working on a couple others. There’s an Annie Lennox song that I might throw on there. She’s amazing. I was doing ‘Why’ for a little bit on tour, which was coming off pretty cool.

But in terms of songwriters that I grew up with, I’m big on the storytellers of the ’70s, so Carole King, Stevie Nicks, James Taylor, Simon & Garfunkel. That whole world — Rickie Lee Jones, Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Cat Stevens.”

Who are some current artists you respect or admire?

“The Milk Carton Kids are phenomenal. They’re sort of Simon & Garfunkel, very honest and innocent and beautiful and heavy songs. There’s a woman, Keren Ann, who is a French artist who’s always just writing beautiful, beautiful songs. I’ve known her for a few years, and she’s great for fall day weather [listening]. There’s a new band, The Dove & The Wolf, also from France, these two young gals who have these angelic voices. I’ve started to get into them and I think they’re really great. And I always think Kanye West is doing mind-blowing things, has really smart lyrics. So it’s all over the map for what I’m into.”

This is in no way related to music, but I understand that we’re both addicted to HGTV. For weeks, I’ve had this bedtime ritual of watching episodes of “House Hunters” before going to bed, which is so bizarre.

“No, it’s not! I totally understand. I’ve emailed the Property Brothers before, ‘How do I get on your show? What do you want to do? Let’s find a space.’ I am obsessed! I will watch HGTV 24 hours a day if I have the ability to. I just think it’s so interesting, and have dreams of kitchen backsplashes, tiling my own bathtub, and cement floors and how I’m going to paint them. All of these things. I’ve been collecting photos of my dream creation house for years, so I’m right there with you.”

///

Here’s the tracklisting for Heavyweight, out November 20:

01 “Heavyweight”
02 “Has It Happened Yet”
03 “It’ll Do”
04 “Falling In Love Again”
05 “Nothing Gets By Here”
06 “Keep Going”

Heavyweight is available for pre-order. Yamagata has also released an exclusive NoiseTrade mixtape featuring seven acoustic loft recordings and three studio tracks, including “It’ll Do” from Heavyweight.

Be sure to catch Rachael Yamagata during her upcoming tour (ticketing info):

11/15 – Electric Owl – Vancouver, BC
11/16 – Tractor Tavern – Seattle, WA
11/17 – Doug Fir Lounge – Portland, OR
11/19 – The Independent – San Francisco, CA
11/20 – El Rey Theatre – Los Angeles, CA
11/21 – Anthology – San Diego, CA
11/23 – The State Room – Salt Lake City, UT
11/24 – Larimer Lounge – Denver, CO
11/26 – The Varsity Theater – Minneapolis, MN
11/27 – City Winery – Chicago, IL
11/28 – Radio Radio – Indianapolis, IN
11/30 – Mr. Small’s Theatre – Pittsburgh, PA
12/1 – Virgin Mobile Mod Club – Toronto, ON
12/3 – La Sal Rossa – Montreal, QC
12/4 – Paradise Rock Club – Boston, MA
12/5 – Joe’s Pub – New York, NY
12/7 – First Unitarian Church – Sanctuary – Philadelphia, PA
12/8 – The Night Cat – Easton, MD
12/9 – U Street Music Hall – Washington , DC
12/10 – Local 506 – Chapel Hill, NC
12/12 – Vinyl – Atlanta, GA
12/13 – The Bottletree – Birmingham, AL
12/14 – 3rd & Lindsley – Nashville, TN