BIO

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.

Released October 3, 2025, via Jullian Records, 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 in her home studio in the Catskill mountains 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.”

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,” 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.”

From there, the record opens into “Birds,” a grief-soaked yet strangely buoyant meditation on signs, memory, and the metaphysical. Inspired by the sudden appearance of birds crashing into her window – and written in part for a cousin weathering the long-ago loss of his mother – it’s a message song in disguise: Lyrically light, emotionally direct, and threaded with hope. “The extra layers of loneliness that exist when you lose somebody and still have to experience the craziness of this world struck me. For me, the veil between what’s on the other side and what is here now is thin. It’s a reminder to watch for the signs from those that have passed – especially now when the world’s gone crazy.”

If “Birds” marks a spiritual turning point, then “Carnival” is the emotional breakthrough: A bold, no-makeup, bathrobe-on-the-porch anthem about walking away from everything that no longer fits. It’s unfiltered and explosive – a personal reckoning turned liberating call-to-arms. “I’m not playing a role anymore,” Yamagata says. “Whether it’s staying in the industry, or in a relationship, or in a job you hate… I’ve had enough.” The vocals are raw. The orchestration is cinematic. It’s a release in every sense – joyful, fierce, and completely earned.

By contrast, “Galaxy” flows above the chaos – a cosmic meditation on energy, creation, and what might be here to assist us if we stay open to the unknown. Written after an intuitive reading and recorded with friends during a full moon, it’s one of the album’s most delicate and expansive offerings. “If I really went on, you’d think I was insane,” Yamagata laughs. “But if I have the ability to plant a seed and open a door towards something more galactic, that’s what that song is.”

And then there’s “Somebody Like Me,” Yamagata’s reluctant ninth track. “It’s a pebble in my shoe,” she says – a song written on a hard day, when questions like Is it worth it? and Should I quit? bubbled too close to the surface. At once tender and tired, the song captures the shadow side of persistence: the cost of comparison and carrying on anyway. “The good outweighs the bad,” she says, “but some days it’s just tough. It’s not a moment of my ego that I’d love to showcase, but it is honest and probably relatable for any artist out there.”

Starlit Alchemy ends not with resolution, but with a kind of expanded awareness – a recognition that transformation isn’t clean and new challenges will continue the journey, but we are in it now, and we are climbing.  Where “Heaven Help” asked for a sign from somewhere out there to assist us at rock bottom, “Reprise” bookends the album with a call to the moon to “light up the land…reminding us to see you” as if to say, don’t forget about the compass in your pocket. Yamagata says. “I want people to know these songs are not necessarily an easy experience, but it may be akin to an ayahuasca dream or a guide rope through the fog… and if it helps move something through you – pain, grief, whatever you can’t articulate – then that’s the point. That’s what music can do.”

artist biography © Mitch Mosk, 2025