Rachael Yamagata w/ Cory Chisel

In the two years following her popular debut record, singer-songwriter Rachael Yamagata broke with her label, floundered in love and suffered the loss of her stepmother. She retreated to the wooded mountains outside of Woodstock, N.Y., to channel her woes into what turned out to be a whole lot of songs, resulting in her double-album, Elephants… Teeth Sinking Into Heart. The two discs of split the songs by emotion. Elephants is sad, filled with the piano-accompanied heartache that made Yamagata’s music a staple of melodramas like “Grey’s Anatomy.” Teeth Sinking Into Heart is angry, built around Yamagata’s first forays into defiant guitar rock. The album perfectly captures two stages of grief.