She’s got the whole package: beauty, brains, talent. But that’s no insurance for the jazz/ rock singer-song writer Rachael Yamagata against heartbreak and pain.

And for that we’re grateful, because, otherwise, Yamagata wouldn’t be able to give musical voice to sadness, about her past loves – the longing, the wanting and the endings, in her trademark sexy, husky undertones.

Since her first foray into music a decade ago, as a skinny 19-year-old singing in a funk band called Bumpus, the Japanese-German Virginia-native has gone solo. Leaving Bumpus as well as her band-member-boyfriend, she took her piano and guitar, a bruised heart and a raw and husky voice to Arista’s Private Music in 2002 . The result? Her first full-length album in 2004 called Happenstance, which was exactly that – by chance and circumstance.

Sitting in front of the dark-haired beauty on Mar 16 at a press conference at the Esplanade, was a surreal experience. After all, at 29, Yamagata still has her teenage beauty (long, dark hair, pouty lips, freckled skin under droopy, green eyes) but with all the confidence of a woman that could make any girl envious.

On Love and Happenstance

Despite being compared to countless music icons, such as Norah Jones, Sarah McLachlan, Fiona Apple, Yamagata is, as cliché as it sounds, in a league of her own. She mixes soft piano ballads with rock music and vocals that move from drawling, sultry whispers and raspy altos to sky-high notes.

Strangely enough, for someone of her range, she confesses that, “Quiet” was one of the most “difficult” tracks on Happenstance to record.

“‘Quiet’ was very touching for me. [It’s] about questioning whether you’ve made a difference in someone else’s life when something [has] ended. You go through this period of self doubt and [you] wonder whether it was worth it, whether you’ve touched this person, whether your lives [have] changed,” she reveals with a hint of sadness in her voice.

“That was something I wrote after a pretty tough end. I remember sobbing away while I wrote it… It’s touching because it’s so vulnerable.”

If you listen to the 9 minute track, “Quiet”, it has about 3 minutes of just that – quiet.

“There’s also a hidden track called ‘Ode to…’ that I wrote on the very last day of recording and it was fresh off this tumultuous end of something. I had this lyric sheet on the floor and one microphone playing and [I] was reading off the lyric sheet…

We just did one take and that was it.”

Music: Therapy or haunting reminders of the past?

“The songs – as long as they’re truthful and I remain in the moment, wherever I was when I wrote them, then they come back to remind me of where I was – but never in a bad way. I love capturing something with my whole-hearted, full intention of getting it all down no matter how painful it was,” she reveals.

“They might haunt my ex-boyfriends but the songs don’t [come back to haunt me]…I’ve got guys that are hoping they’re going to make it into a song,” she laughs.

However, perhaps this is Yamagata’s first album and she has yet to explore other sounds of music, but a few of the tracks seem too similar to each other. It may be the signature Rachael Yamagata sound, but she could do with a bit more variety.

Thankfully she promises, “The new record (which is underway) is actually quite different. There’s still going to be carryover of beautiful ballads. The themes are still centered on relationships like the first, [but] the lyrics are bit more poetic this time. [I] really fell in love with metaphors and little clues so you’re going to have to weave in and out a little bit. There’s this kind of live rock side that’s come out.”

Happenstance is the perfect record to hit for a lovelorn soul.

If you’ve missed out on Rachael Yamagata’s near sold-out performance for the Mosaic Music Festival at the Esplanade on Mar 17, you can grab a copy of Happenstance at HMV for $19.95.