New York’s Rachael Yamagata recently announced her new studio album in almost ten years, Starlit Alchemy (pre-save), due out on October 3rd via Jullian Records. Sequenced intentionally and layered with dreamlike, ambient textures, full-band flourishes, and live-in-the-room warmth, Starlit Alchemy is less a diary and more a transmission: Something intuitive, elemental, and built to resonate.
The album’s arc begins with “Backwards,” out now, a song Yamagata had been circling for many years. First conceived as part of a musical, it reemerged here as a quiet thesis statement – a reckoning with the pull of transformation and all that comes with leaving parts of your world behind. “‘I’ve already started running, but there’s still a hope someone else is going to catch up and go with me’” she says. “There’s ache in that tension.”
Rachael further explains to FLOOD Magazine: “Backwards” is the ache of splitting paths when you KNOW you’ve begun a new journey and are too far on it now to turn around and wait for anyone else to catch up. It is the bittersweet excitement for what is to come and the realization of what must be left behind.”
With her unmistakable voice as a touchstone, the Hudson Valley-based singer/songwriter returns on Starlit Alchemy not as the torch-song siren or heartbreak whisperer of years past, but as a guide for transformation – shedding what no longer serves, naming the ache, and reaching toward something more. The songs off her long-awaited fifth studio album are a chrysalis in real time: A cinematic, soul-stirring journey through grief, surrender, resilience, and release. Equal parts storm and salve, Starlit Alchemy roams the cave and the stars. It weaves galactic counsel into our human experience. It’s a soundtrack for personal excavation and mystical rebirth, made to be felt in full.
Starlit Alchemy is the triumphant result of hard-earned clarity and recalibration. Arriving nine years after her last LP – 2016’s Tightrope Walker – Yamagata’s new record finds her fully in the driver’s seat of her career: 13 years self-managed, untouched by record labels past and untethered by genre or obligation. She wrote the album both before and during 2020, funded it through international touring, and recorded most of it in her home studio in the Catskills with longtime collaborators. ‘Yama’ itself means ‘mountain’ in Japanese – her father’s heritage perhaps fatedly tied to her mother’s, her roots a hundred years-plus from Woodstock, NY. Climbing, moving, and becoming the mountain would not be an incorrect description of the process and experience of this particular album. A backdrop of loved ones passing for many involved on the record, and her own bouts with everything from TMJ to hearing loss, multiple stop-starts and reset moments all weaved their influence into the final recording.
A fiercely independent artist with a voice both instantly recognizable and emotionally unflinching, Rachael Yamagata first emerged in the early 2000s with her critically acclaimed debut Happenstance. Over the next two decades, she built a loyal following on the strength of her raw, cinematic songwriting and soul-baring live performances – releasing a string of beloved records including Elephants…Teeth Sinking Into Heart, Chesapeake, and Tightrope Walker. Known for pairing bruising vulnerability with wry humor and unrelenting grit, she’s worked with artists as varied as Liz Phair, Toots and The Maytals, Ray LaMontagne, Ryan Adams, and Bright Eyes, while consistently forging her own path outside the major label system.
Now, she’s returned with her most cohesive and intentional work yet. Starlit Alchemy isn’t a collection of singles or an algorithmic playlist; it’s a “deep dive record,” as Yamagata calls it – a body of work meant to be heard in full. “I always knew it was going to be a one song-flows-into-the-next album,” she says. “The songs started as a compulsion to just express what I was going through and witnessing – only later did I realize the more cohesive story. It became a map made after the journey, not before. But it’s all in there.”
The story – one of personal loss and universal rediscovery – took shape slowly, over a few years of restructuring and creative risk. “It began as a stream of consciousness record and I actually did the first demos as a mini movie soundtrack played one after the other with linking interludes.”
And though the themes are heavy, the experience is anything but. Starlit Alchemy is not about bypassing pain, but evolving through it. “It’s forensics for trauma and beauty and the bittersweetness of the in-tandem nature of both. Fear, loss, grief are major throughlines, but it’s the magic of what happens when you immerse yourself fully into the experience that begins the alchemy. The strength forms during the surrender and what you once were is shed.” As for what it sounds like, Yamagata can only say, “Perhaps think of Tom Waits as Willy Wonka and Ricki Lee Jones as Dorothy in a soundscape mentored by Hans Zimmer and Joni Mitchell – from her Both Sides Now album. None of which I’m well versed in by the way, so forgive any pretense.”
RACHAEL YAMAGATA ON TOUR
Tue Oct-7 Fairfield, CT StageOne
Thu Oct-9 Washington, DC Miracle Theatre
Fri Oct-10 Philadelphia, PA City Winery
Sat Oct-11 Kingston, NY O+ Festival
Tue Oct-14 Boston, MA The Armory
Wed Oct-15 Brooklyn, NY St. John’s Lutheran Church
Thu Oct-23 Chicago, IL City Winery
Thu Oct-30 Seattle, WA Fremont Abbey
Fri Oct-31 Portland, OR Old Church
Mon Nov-3 San Francisco, CA The Chapel
Thu Nov-6 Los Angeles, CA Masonic Lodge
