Major Label Darling Goes D.I.Y.

This time, it was supposed to be easy. After a four-year delay between Rachael Yamagata’s star-making RCA debut Happenstance and her Warner Bros. follow-up, Elephants, the plan was to go right back into the studio to start a third album. But, as fortune had it, Yamagata’s Warner deal became a casualty of label restructuring and the legal dust didn’t settle until March 2011.

When the singer/songwriter finally got the all clear to move on, the first call she made was to Happenstance producer John Alagia. “I said, ‘Do you want to make some music?” she says, six months later over a glass of Pinot Grigio in downtown Manhattan. Alagia was up for it and the two immediately began booking musicians, taking out loans for instrument rentals and coordinating travel with frequent-flyer miles. “The timeline has had a crazy velocity since then simply because there’s no one there to say no,” she says. “You just… go.”

Specifically, they went to Alagia’s Easton, Md., house – right on the Chesapeake Bay. “It was very much a camping, underdog, who-knows-what’s-going to happen experience,” she says. Team Yamagata stayed in tents and on air mattresses for just over a week of recording the debut album for the singer’s new label, Frankenfish, and listened to The Carpenters, Carly Simon and The Beach Boys in between takes. Though the ‘60s and ‘70s acts served as touchstones, Yamagata says that the music easily took its own shape. Chesapeake – with upbeat tempos the rule rather than the exception – is a bit different than its predecessors stylistically; the album’s got juice.

In July, Yamagata started a campaign on funding site PledgeMusic to help with marketing, touring and album distribution for the record. On the first day of the campaign, she raised 73 percent of her goal; she ended up surpassing it within weeks. Yamagata’s successful foray into fan financing allowed her to add to the basic arrangements and beef up touring plans.

“I’m thrilled and terrified at the same time about releasing independently,” she says. “As long as I can keep moving, like a little shark – like a Frankenfish.” The singer chose to name her label after the predatory land-and-water dwelling northern snakehead, which inhabits the Chesapeake for a reason. “You don’t know what it’s capable of,” she says with a sly smile. “I liked the idea of that.”