"Maine expat Rachel Efron combines a light, gentle touch on the piano with the eye and the voice of a poet to make some of the loveliest music one has heard—soft, intimate, ethereal, and strikingly genuine"– San Francisco Examiner

"Utterly laid-back piano pop that sucks the tension right out of the room. Efron makes it sound easy but there's a reason so few artists get it right" -- East Bay Express

To listen to a Rachel Efron song is to be led across an inner landscape at once beautiful, dangerous, serene, and startling. Rachel offers that rare combination of solid musicianship and sophisticated lyricism. In her words, her music is “about intimacy—and the ways we conceal and reveal ourselves to ourselves and each other.” She is versed in jazz, folk, pop, and rock, and as she delves into her perspectives of life and love, she moves unabashedly from the sad and sweet to the saucy and swinging.

In 2006 Efron released her debut CD, “Say Goodbye,” a collection of 11 original piano/voice-centric alternative/pop songs. It was produced by Jon Evans, bassist for Tori Amos, and features Evans on bass, Scott Amendola (Nels Cline, Madeleine Peyroux) on drums, and Julie Wolf (Ani Difranco) on accordion, and is splattered with Evan’s classy arrangements for horns and strings.

Standout tracks include “What I Know,” a fantasy about returning to the place you grew up to encounter yourself as you used to be, “Sentimental Love,” an evocative account of waking in the bed of a lover having dreamt of someone else, and the title track, “Say Goodbye,” a breathtaking account of a season passed, taking with it the expectation of love. All of the tracks explore the interplay of Rachel’s impressionistic piano work and intimate voice with the alternately delicate and grooving accompaniment of her remarkable fellow musicians.

Rachel grew up in small coastal town in Maine called Cape Elizabeth, where she took piano lessons, learning the Beethoven sonatas, Debussy Preludes, and Chopin Etudes that to this day remain, perhaps, her biggest musical influence. In high school she was entranced with singer/songwriters—Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell—“yet it didn’t occur to me to try to write a song, myself,” she laughs. Away at college at Harvard University, Rachel studied music with growing seriousness, alongside her major in Social Anthropology. She took classical music classes, not to mention a handful of creative writing classes, and once a week made her way across the Charles River to study jazz piano with a professor at the Berklee College of Music. In her senior year of college, Rachel began her pursuit of songwriting, with the sensation of having arrived home, and the voraciousness of beginning a thing that has been a long time coming. “I had always written prose and poetry,” she reflects, “and I was always playing piano. When I first started writing songs, it was a project in the intersection of those two things, words and music, and I was positively alive with all of the possibilities that come with that.”

Efron scoured the songbooks of Tom Waits, Beth Orton, and Aimee Mann, alongside her deepening engagement in jazz and the work of Billie Holiday, Dave McKenna, and Brad Mehldau. She developed a repertoire of original songs and started singing. That same year she started gigging on campus and recorded a demo in the student-run sound studio in the basement of one of the Harvard dorms.

Upon graduating, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has worked to cultivate her musicianship ever since. Now based in Oakland, she performs both solo and with a band. She has performed with such celebrated Bay Area musicians as Jon Evans, Scott Amendola, Yair Evnine, Joel Behrman, and Adam Theis, and appears regularly with a small ensemble featuring Jon Arkin on percussion and Dan Feizsli on electric and upright bass. She has performed at premier Bay Area venues, including the Independent, Café Du Nord, the Freight and Salvage, the Red Devil Lounge, the Hotel Utah, Anna’s Jazz Island, Downtown, and Mecca. She has had the honor of opening for such national acts as Universal/Decca artist Spencer Day and Atlantic artist Jill Sobule. She has garnered coverage in Bay Area publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the San Francisco Examiner, and her songs have aired on numerous Bay Area radio stations.

Since the release of, “Say Goodbye,” Rachel has continued to write, expanding the range of her musicianship and lyricism yet further. She anticipates returning to the studio for a next collaboration with Jon Evans later this year.