When Rachael Yamagata elected to record her latest album, Chesapeake, at producer John Alagia’s home on the Chesapeake Bay in Easton, Md., she knew there wouldn’t be room enough for all the players and contributors. So she went to a camping equipment store where she discovered what she calls the “Diva Tent.” “I found this big, banana-colored, yellow tent, and got some air mattresses and blankets,” she says. “I dumped them in this tent to have my own little hideaway.”

The tent seems to have had the intended stress-relieving effect, given the relative buoyancy of tone heard on Chesapeake. Yamagata’s previous album, 2008’s fractured, two-disc Elephants … Teeth Sinking Into Heart reflected the confusion and exhaustion she felt following her rise to fame with 2004’s critically hailed Happenstance. “I had gone through this three-year roller-coaster ride of insanity,” she recalls. “It was a very lonely experience, and showed me a grand spectrum of human character.”

That doesn’t mean Chesapeake is all sweetness and light. Take “Starlight,” a deeply arresting vibe song that would sound right at home in European dance clubs. A spoken verse (“I couldn’t see a thing tonight/Not one star”), delivered in a detached voice, suggests nothing so much as a leather-clad dominatrix pacing the room. “I read one review, and they said, ‘In her menacing new track …’ and I was like, ‘Ooh, I made it to “menacing”!’” says the Virginia native with a laugh. “But it is a little dark, and a little sexy, too. I’d gone through this toxic relationship and I couldn’t get out of it, so the song became sort of a meditation on addiction, in a way. The dark songs are always the most beckoning.”

Yamagata, 34, elected to release Chesapeake on her own Frankenfish label. She financed the album with fan donations through the PledgeMusic website; she also got an assist from her father, who threw in some money he’d set aside for her wedding. “I feel simultaneously totally in and out of control of my life now,” she says. “But if I earn great success or not, I’ve gotten a lot more chances to take risks and follow my own instincts. My goal is to just keep moving. Whatever feels fresh, inspired and authentic to me is what I’m going to do.”

–Alanna Nash