Bio

In simplest terms, Rachel Bachman is a singer-songwriter. Her voice is bountifully expressive in dynamics, inflection, and timbre. Her songs are emotionally complex with a pitch-perfect balance of humor and mystery. Her style, however, is hard to pin down. Many have tried and failed.

This puts Bachman's music with the likes of Regina Spektor and Tom Waits, influences of hers that have also proven too idiosyncratic for proper classification and so are routinely shrugged off into the "alternative" bin. Some darts land close--chamber pop, freak folk, indie, and dark cabaret all capture their respective angles of Bachman's sound--but if there's a category that hits the bullseye, it hasn't been coined yet.

She was born into Michigan's scene, where she roomed with Samantha Crain and played open mics hosted by Nathan Kalish, but her musical upbringing is best credited to Tulsa, OK. It's here that her DIY ethic and vaudevillian artistry took root in a niche substratum of the town's more recognized country and folk music scene.

Though uncharacteristic of the "Tulsa sound," Bachman has garnered attention through spotlight gigs in the city, including Tulsa Little Jam at the Woody Guthrie Center, BaseCamp Festival, and MisFest (the latter as local support for Katie Herzig). It's in this thriving stew of music collaboration that she found like-minded offbeat musicians to welcome her blossoming ideas, some of whom have since taken permanent residence in her band, the Better News Bears.

The Bears at present are Matt Magerkurth (string arrangements + cello), Olivia McGraw (violin), Jordan Hehl (upright bass), Chris Foster (piano), Nicholas Foster (drums + percussion), and Delaney Zumwalt (backing vox). Bachman leads the septet with guitar, ukulele, and vocal arrangements.

The gang first got together for the release of Bachman's 2018 solo album, I'm All Ives, and made their proper debut as Rachel Bachman and the Better News Bears with their 2019 single "Timekiller". It's with her tagalong bandmates that Bachman has grown her music into even more lush and esoteric skies as she continues to blossom in her career. The expert ensemble broadens her brushstrokes into swells of strings and speckled keys, and with their full-length debut as a band, their chemistry is as strong as ever.

Rachel Bachman and the Better News Bears aren't for everyone. Their music doesn't fit neatly into genre standards, and the average DJ would have a hell of a time trying to work it into a seamless set. This is music that bends and blends through a color palette akin to Van Gogh or Paul Klee. It wears its offbeat style so loudly that the beat is barely there. It only employs cliches to make surprises of them. Even in sorrow, it finds joy in not stability but the unexpected. It takes an adventurous listener to truly appreciate the turns of musical and lyrical phrase that thrives here, a realm of sound that is, in short, unmistakably Rachel Bachman.