As audience members quietly mumbled their orders and sipped at their wine, Rachael Yamagata slowly crept out onto the stage at City Winery. The lights dimmed and the sound of clinking glasses slowly faded as she sat down at the piano. She lightly taps the keys, leans into the microphone and begins to sing. After one song, Yamagata stated that she was ready to sing some “sad and hopeless songs” and prepared the audience for what they thought was going to be a depressed evening. Instead, she gave an incredibly sincere and intimate performance.

For those not familiar with Yamagata, she is a singer-songwriter from Virginia. But calling her a singer-songwriter does not do her justice. Yamagata is a storyteller. Her songs illustrate relationships at every point. When they are happy, stagnant and also when they are most devastating. It is her devastating songs where Yamagata shows her mastery as a storyteller. When she played “Over,” a song that she says has stalker undertones, the listener might at first think it sounds like a Regina Spektor song. The piano sounds optimistic, but the way Yamagata hits the keys with force and the mania when she sings lyrics like, “This is over, over, over/This is done,” the listener soon becomes aware of the song’s real intentions. She sang her beautifully gloomy song “Duet” with opener Zach Djanikian and displayed a more melancholic side to her. She was utterly exposing during that song and kept the audience completely spellbound.

What adds to her performance, making it a memorable one, are her vocals. Yamagata has a voice that is one part Brittany Howard from Alabama Shakes and one part Fiona Apple. It has the fervency of Apple and the intensity of Howard. When she sang, “Let Me Be Your Girl,” her vocals imbued the lyrics with passion and allowed the listener to be vulnerable and intimate with Yamagata.

There were two things that added to the intimacy of this show. The first is that all of the pictures and videos that were projected onto the stage were taken by Yamagata. She curated a performance that invited the audience into her world and whether they were pictures of candles on her porch or videos from when she was touring on the road, every audience member went on a journey with her that evening. The second is that this is a solo tour. Besides Yamagata, a piano and a guitar there was nobody else present on stage with her. She confronted the audience and enraptured them with her voice and lyrics, leaving everyone with a sense of shared vulnerability and closeness.

Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat