November 1st, 2024, 8:00PM

Rachael Yamagata with special guest Sandy Bell

@ Wild Heaven Garden Club

The Garden Club Presents:
RACHAEL YAMAGATA
Unseen Hearts Tour

The Garden Club at Wild Heaven West End
Friday, November 1st
Doors: 7:00 PM   Show: 8:00 PM
All Ages

Genre: Rock/Pop, Vocal
Style: Adult Alternative Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Contemporary Singer/Songwriter
R.I.Y.L.: Fiona Apple, Ray Lamantagne, Carol King, Billie Ellish, Liz Phair, Jeff Buckley, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Ryan Adams, Brandi Carlile, Regina Spector, Norah Jones, Joshua Radin, amos Lee, Death Cab For Cutie, Feist, Iron & Wine, Leona Naess, Lisa Germano, Anna Nalick, Jessie Baylin, Missy Higgins, Tom McRae, A Fine Frenzy, Damien Rice, Joe Henry

RACHAEL YAMAGATA

Rachael Yamagata would defend you in a bar fight and then invite everyone out to stargaze in the parking lot. She’s a wilderness guide for wanderers, a galactic diplomat, a dreamscape designer, a heartache survivalist, a pioneer.

She speaks to the misfits, the soul searchers, the silent types longing to be cracked open. Her hardcore fans find her for the major surgeries of life, finding refuge in the dissonant beauty of her chord progressions and songwriting that cuts to the bone. A vocal shapeshifter, she delivers live shows that spark both playful giddiness and profound catharsis. But Yamagata is not here to heal you—she's here to show you how to heal yourself.

Each record has marked a graduation for pivotal life moments. ‘Happenstance’ (2004) chronicled romantic heartaches. ‘Elephants...Teeth Sinking Into Heart’ (2008) delved deeper into loss and broken promises, ushering in the confidence of ‘Chesapeake’ (2011). Going DIY, Yamagata found freedom, mixing lighter love songs with deep dives into what threatens and ultimately strengthens us. ‘Tightrope Walker’ (2016) expanded into resilience, empowerment, and forgiveness.

Her new record (yet to be titled) emerges from this lineage with a dare: sink or swim. Grounded by soul-stirring lyrics like “All of our best laid plans washed away like plastic in the sand” ("Empty Houses") it also winks at new dimensions, suggesting worlds beyond our reach with “The galaxy members are waiting for us/ they learn from our failures and they’re sending us love” (“Galaxy”). This new record sees Yamagata as an emotional archivist, chronicling loneliness and connection and urging us to see our breaking points as opportunities to build something new.

Yamagata has earned her place amongst our top songwriters and vocalists, paving the way for the whispered intimacy of Billie Eilish and intertwining her own gravel and quirk. She will strip production bare on one track and build a story around orchestral arrangements in the next - whatever packs the greater punch. And she does it all with a tell-it-like-it-is honesty that can melt you in the moment and then become an anthem for life. Admirers of PJ Harvey and Fiona Apple find in Yamagata a kindred soul who dances on the line between tenderness and bold defiance, but whose sound is wholly her own. Mix in the songwriting honesty of Bruce Springsteen, the brooding flair of Rufus Wainwright, the gritty poetry of Lucinda Williams and you might come closer to pinning her down.

Having earned wide critical acclaim and sold over 400,000 records, she has headlined world tours and made numerous television appearances. She’s performed for President Obama and Deepak Chopra, been a featured artist on NPR, and has over 38 million streams on Spotify. She’s played Madison Garden, Carnegie Hall and collaborated with a diverse spectrum of artists including Conor Oberst, Mandy Moore, Ray Lamontagne, and Toots and the Maytals.

As we collectively face a reckoning with our planet and ourselves, Yamagata has been watching. And she’s got more to say. "Along with the bad-assery, Yamagata brings a world-weary passion to her singing. Her voice is a soul-baring, sultry instrument that commands center stage at all times. She has that deliberate, I’ll-sing-the-note-when-I’m-ready pacing that helped make Amy Winehouse great, and before her Billie Holliday.” Associated Press

“Finally, an heir to Bonnie Raitt.” - NP

“Catchy and engaging, but consistently smart to boot” -- Mother Jones

“Yamagata’s voice is superb at evoking languid heartache” – Uncut

SANDY BELL

Alternative musician, singer-songwriter Sandy Bell plumbs the damaged American psyche with the poetical precision of Emily Dickinson and the cinematic psychological acuity of David Lynch. In essence, she transmutes the bone-core despair and grief of broken American dreams and fears into a sonic cathedral of songs – a cathartic transfiguration of pain to reckoning. 

Bell’s solo debut album, When I Leave Ohio (2017), is an intensely personal excavation of broken dreams, of the difficulties of love, of the oft quiet rage that can consume oneself and those we love. It explores, “All the ways I leave … and all the ways they left.”  Joan Wasser’s (aka Joan As Policewoman) haunting violin snakes through the Americana poetry of birds, blue eyeshadow, cash registers, and purses filled with cold stones, and the spiritually infused lush, enunciated musical production, while Bell’s voice floats over all like a ghostly prayer. 

Stereo Embers Magazine writes of Bell’s debut: “When I Leave Ohio (2017) is one of the darkest, most moving song cycles this critic has heard since Patty Griffin’s Living With Ghosts or Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska ... Sandy Bell’s songs have such poetic precision and crushing emotional exactitude, her work is nothing short of staggering.”

Bell’s follow up album Entelechy (en-ˈte-lə-kē) 2023 reaches for the stars through the crack in Pandora’s box. Inspired by the natural and invisible forces of our mysterious world, the songs emotionally and musically mirror the subtle intricacies of cellular biology, the heartbeat of tall dark pines and moss, and the gravitational pull binding us to endlessly revolve around that luminous star sun that we awake to every day. Music journalist Alex Green raved that Entelechy is “filled with stirring melancholy and musical grace,” an album that “explores the geometry of both musical form and sorrow, while the cathartic transmutation of grief into promise will take you somewhere between the worlds of Harry Nilsson and Kate Bush.”

Born the youngest of five in Cleveland, OH, her father was an  ice deliveryman and community college teacher and her mother worked at hotels, grocery stores and the local horse track. Even though there was “a beautiful attempt at the American dream,” her family life was darkened by the realities of the myth and Bell developed a “distrust of anything too happy” and a realization that she was in “the underbelly of the animal.” Music was her respite. Raised in the church, she remembers the thrill of listening to her family lined one after another raising their voices: her mother, a voice like the English  sweetheart singer Vera Lynn, and her father with his gift for harmonies and a voice that sounded like he was an “astronaut singing from outer space.” It was here in the church listening to the organist or choir and looking up at the stained glass and sculptures that music and art became neurally fused in her head. Later, inspired by the original abstract expressionists Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner and Elain de Kooning, she realized when an artwork is emotionally honest, she hears its music. 

Her most notable collaborations have included background vocals on Bat For Lashes Mercury Prize nominated album The Bride (2016). She also co-wrote and recorded with her good friend the brilliant and soulful Jeff Buckley during their 80s Hollywood days. The song Hollywould, co-written with Buckley and featuring him on acoustic guitar, was included on her EP My Muse My Monkey (GSI Records 2000). 

After Bell opened a number of dates on Rachel Yamagata’s Galactic Trees Tour (2022-24), Yamagata said, “There is something otherworldly about Sandy and her offerings that encourage us to unapologetically reach for words like ‘channeling’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘healing’ and essence.’ Her role as an artist is bigger than most may understand at first, but if you dive into the ocean that she offers, you will find magic very few have privy to thus far.”