A woman with a voice that gets under your skin at the piano - Tori Amos and Fiona Apple are the first things that come to mind for most people. So Rachael Yamagata faces those associations all the time. It's not known that she has publicly resisted them. What is known is that there were papers that wrote in CD reviews of Yamagata's early work that she was actually better than Apple. One journalist credited the musician from the state of Virginia with not achieving the emotional complexity (which many find exhausting), although she too knows how to thematize desperate romances. Since she always places her emotional worlds in daring sound designs, her actions are acknowledged as courageous. To put the aforementioned piano ladies at the back of the list, it's always Yamagata's powerful voice with its dark, mysterious timbre that brings up comparisons to Nick Cave, Tom Waits and PJ Harvey. There's no need to argue with that either, especially since she's been confirmed often enough to have long since found a distinctive style of her own.
Text source and more information about this event: https://www.brotfabrik.de/index.php?id=25&month=4&year=2019
