Rachael Yamagata w/ Mike Viola

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 2008 double-album, Elephants… Teeth Sinking Into Heart. The two discs split the songs by emotion. Elephants was sad, filled with the piano-accompanied heartache that made Yamagata's music a staple of melodramas like “Grey's Anatomy.” Teeth Sinking Into Heart was angry, built around Yamagata's first forays into defiant guitar rock. Funded by fan donations and released through her own label, the songstress' latest album, Chesapeake, is less turbulent and features a more hopeful lyrical bent.