Ronald WanA cold didn’t stop Rachael Yamagata from putting on one of her best concerts at Esplanade Concert Hall.
“It’s nice to visit other countries and find out people are just as miserable as you,” chimed Rachael Yamagata halfway through her concert. That pretty much summed up the mood of the American singer-songwriter’s repertoire of melancholic songs. It was “enough to slit one’s wrists at the end of the concert,” quipped a fellow concert goer.
Despite nursing a cold, Yamagata’s concert on Apr 15 at the Esplanade Concert Hall turned out fine, if not awesome. She made up for her slightly hoarse voice by interacting with the audience. Case in point – an audience member asked her where had she been for the past few years (her latest album Elephants…Teeth Sinking Into Heart was released in late 2008, 4 long years after Happenstance), to which she replied candidly, “I was hibernating.”
When she was last in Singapore for the Mosaic Music Festival in 2007, she had a bad cough. This time, her cold and hoarse voice was equally evident, especially when she hit the high notes in tunes like “Worn Me Down” and “Be Be Your Love“.
Perhaps the reason for her quavering voice is the known fact that Yamagata likes to smoke and drink quite a bit. She let on, “I was at the back smoking with Jack and Rai (the local duo was the opening act) and I saw a bunch of weird people dressing up as cats!” Those “cats” happened to be the cast from the musical Cats, performing next door at the Esplanade theatre.
Accompanied by her 4-piece band and dressed in an oversized mustard-coloured dress, she wooed the audience with her wit and effortless charm. At one point, she asked the audience what songs they wanted to hear, which elicited shouting of various song titles, including this writer’s spur of the moment marriage proposal (“Marry me, Rachael!”). Unfortunately, the proposal was drowned by the rest of the screaming crowd. Whatever.
Amid the fun and laughter, her soulful and stirring voice seeped through in haunting tunes like “Even So“, “Letter Read” and “What If I Leave“. Given her new musical direction (a balance of ballads and rock in Elephants), she lifted the melancholic mood with upbeat songs such as “Accident” and “Sidedish Friend” while playing on her guitar.
Although the audience turnout was an impressive 1,300 nestled in a huge hall, Yamagata made the setting a much more intimate affair with her personal banter and storytelling. She spoke of how she met bears on her way back home one night (“That was it. I thought I was going to be eaten by a bear!”) and encountered a male ghost playing trumpet in a studio in Woodstock (“I asked him to play the trumpet again and it was really beautiful!”). If her anecdotes didn’t terrify the audience, they fascinated them. Her affable personality was a joy to watch.
The concert, which ran over 2 hours, ended with a hilarious encore rendition of “Duet” and the song made popular on teenage soap drama The O.C., “Reason Why“. The original “Duet” was sung with folk singer Ray LaMontagne. But since he wasn’t at the concert, she harmonised alone this time, lowering her voice with girlish amusement.
Whether her voice was high, low or hoarse, Yamagata’s profound and heartfelt concert certainly got under our skin. And thankfully nobody slit his or her wrists.