After singer/songwriter Rachael Yamagata was freed from her contract with Warner Bros., she called producer John Alagia about making her third album. She didn't send him songs to consider, and they didn't discuss material. The next day, they were making arrangements to get equipment and musicians to his house in Maryland.
"Within a few weeks, we were ... actually doing it," Yamagata said in a phone interview this week, promoting her November 12 performance at the Redstone Room.
Moving quickly was a response to "several years of kind of being in this holding-pattern experiment with major record labels," she said. "It was a lot of leap-before-you-look scenarios. I just knew that if you got the right people in the room, we could make it work."
And the right people wanted to help. "I think people look at me maybe as an underdog of sorts, always wanting good things for me," she said. "A lot of my peers I think have felt the frustration with me about 'Where's your next record?' or 'Why aren't you on the road?'"
