photo: Tommy Kha
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Alynda Segarra has been drawn to the desert lately.
“It’s like a vortex, a crossroads of time,” the singer-songwriter observes. “You’re in the past but also in the present. I feel like so many people go out there to get clean in some way. People go there to search for something.”
Segarra—who records vibrant, folk-leaning music under the name Hurray for the Riff Raff—seemed to find some kind of clarity among the gritty, gorgeous landscapes of the Southwest. In recent years, they’ve spent a fair amount of time in New Mexico—a locale that looms large on “Buffalo,” a dust-blown, mid-tempo singalong from their recently released ninth LP, The Past Is Still Alive.
“Two moons and a raging river/ Saddled up by the piñon on fire,” Segarra nearly whispers over a gently strummed acoustic guitar. “Drove out to the edge of the pueblo/ Bought a drum from a man who cried/ And the children’s show is on the ceiling/ And the way that you hold my hand/ And I yelled and I didn’t know the reason/ But I knew that you’d understand.”
There are other links to the region within the world of Still Alive—the cowboy hats and mountain backdrops in the album art, the filmed-in-New-Mexico heist of the “Hawkmoon” video. The area’s enigmatic tranquility seeps into the aesthetic. “Obviously on ‘Buffalo,’ I talk specifically about New Mexico, but, on the rest of the record, I really don’t; yet, it still feels like the desert to me,” Segarra says. “I had been spending some time out there—I went out there for my birthday two years in a row. I checked out Taos Pueblo, and I went to Santa Fe. It felt like somewhere I could reset.”
Anyone who’s spent time there understands the magnetic pull Segarra describes—that brain-wobbling dislocation you feel gazing out at the Pueblo or down at the river from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. And The Past Is Still Alive sucks you into a similar emotional vortex: Its songs feel ancient yet familiar, specific in image yet universal in theme, like a kaleidoscope of present joy and painful memory—and vice versa.
It’s a major moment for a songwriter whose story is similarly cinematic— filled with enough struggle and resilience to motor a big-budget biopic. Segarra, born of Puerto Rican descent in the Bronx, didn’t have the easiest upbringing. Their uncle and aunt raised them following the separation of their father—a jazz musician dealing with trauma from the Vietnam War—and their mother, who worked for then-mayor Rudy Giuliani. Finding a voice within the NYC punk scene, Segarra left home—hitchhiking and riding freight trains as a teenager, then discovering a community in New Orleans, where they joined a hobo band.
Back in the train days, Segarra, now 36, started writing lyrics to old folk tunes— they didn’t have a phone (this was pre-smartphones anyway), so adapting material was the easiest way to remember it. They look back fondly on the long stretches of “sitting and watching,” bouncing around ideas in their head, only able to have a real conversation when the train noise stopped.
“The life of a train-rider is really interesting because you spend so much time waiting,” they say. “You’re waiting sometimes two days for a train, and you’re in the hobo jungle. I was lucky when I finally found my friends in New Orleans and we started traveling together. We had so much time to sit around and trade songs.
“And we spend a lot of time walking—you’re walking for fucking miles,” they continue. “It’s such a monk life, even though we were also drinking. [Laughs.] It’s not that monk-like, but it is in the way that you’re like, ‘We have to walk all these miles. Then we have to sneak through this hole in the fence.’ [On the train], you have to fucking calm down and be OK with sitting and thinking, sitting and watching. I really enjoyed being in that type of mindset most of the time. But I still wasn’t in touch with my voice per se. Now I feel so much more like all the languages of each album and all the stages in my life are finally coming together. Of course, now the challenge is, ‘How do I live in modern society and also make the time for that artistic realm—to be in that mindset?’”
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That challenge has fueled a string of fascinating albums that ponder identity, social issues and the wisdom gained from memory—including 2022’s Life on Earth, their debut for Nonesuch Records and first collaboration with producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee). For years, Segarra had been stretching out beyond their Americana roots, but here they rendered that label pointless, slipping their artful, gently twangy croon around volatile indie-rock guitars and slinky electronics.
“With Life on Earth, I was so excited by exploration,” they recall. “I really needed to feel inspired, and that meant writing songs with a different approach than just me and my guitar. When it was done and I was on the road with it, these [new] songs were coming to me. Me and Brad both talked about the next one, feeling like it was going to be different. He brought up Sparklehorse, which I thought was a great reference. He played me It’s a Wonderful Life, and I was so hypnotized by that. He said he felt like I’m so raw on the demo and I’m not performing—I’m just being myself, and this emotionality comes out. It’s totally not perceived. That was the beginning of the road we started going down, and it grew and changed with the song. It feels very desert-y to me. It feels like there’s so much space—the space of time.”
For what eventually became The Past Is Still Alive, Segarra leaned on a crucial cast of characters to bring that vibe to life— including Cook (who also played multiple instruments, notably bass on nine of 11 tracks), Mike Mogis (pedal-steel, synth), Phil Cook (keyboards, guitar, Dobro, marimba), Matt Douglas (saxophone), Yan Westerlund (drums), an array of background singers (including Conor Oberst) and Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy (guitar), whose atmospheric parts highlight the album’s from-the-gut quality.
Cook, who co-produced the second Hand Habits album, 2019’s placeholder, recruited Duffy to stop by while they were in the Durham area—resulting in a day of rapid-fire recording and, subsequently, a deep admiration for Segarra, whose music Duffy hadn’t heard at that point.
“The songs were amazing,” they say. “They’re such a good storyteller. When I went into the studio, I had some harebrained ideas, and they both were like, ‘Go crazy.’ It takes a lot of confidence to let somebody come in and do their thing. It’s what makes this record exciting to me— and their storytelling [offers] a perspective that I don’t think a lot of people bring to the music they make. There’s a blue-collar-ness to their music that I really relate to. There’s such a consistency of self.”
All of the session players added to the mosaic, helping capture the mood Segarra envisioned early on. (They mention Lucinda Williams as an inspiration for the record’s “tight and catchy and somewhat simple guitar hooks” and elsewhere point to the distinctive tone of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks.) But the musicians were helpful in another, equally important way—serving as a steadying presence during a time of horrible grief. Segarra started recording at Brad Cook’s North Carolina studio in March 2023—a mere one month after the death of their father.
“I came into the studio so fucked up from grief and shock,” Segarra says, examining how that loss shifted both their performance and perspective. “There were moments that felt a little creepy. It’s subtle—it’s not like I’m talking so much about death. It’s just singing these songs, knowing more intimately that life ends, that people go away forever. Also, I’ve learned so much about grief, and I’m still learning, and it’s this understanding now that grief is another expression of love. It just really tenderized me. I’m more aware of, ‘Wow, this is my life, and I’ve been through so much, but I’m also so fucking lucky! Here I am in this studio, making a record! That’s fucking crazy!’ There were a lot of moments of feeling so much gratitude, and then a lot of moments of feeling like, ‘Why me? Why did this happen?’ It really shed a lot of the performance anxiety that I can get sometimes.”
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The Past Is Still Alive contains some of the most beautiful Hurray for the Riff songs Segarra has ever written—including the heartbreaking, fingerpicked ballad “Colossus of Roads,” which originated during a touring break when Segarra was reading a lot of Eileen Myles’ poetry and watching a lot of films. (“I have a Criterion login,” they say.)
“I just needed beautiful inspiration around me,” they recall. “I was trying to create this world of beauty around me because I felt so depleted and disenchanted with going outside, basically. [Laughs.] Then when the Club Q shooting happened in [Colorado Springs in November 2022], this song kind of tumbled out of me. It was this thing of, ‘I want to create this three-and-whatever minutes where you can get under a fort with your friend, and I can be like, ‘Look at this beautiful thing.’”
The album’s centerpiece, “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive),” is soothing, moonlit folk-rock carried by a series of seemingly disconnected memories— including scenes from their childhood (“Try to remember most everything/ Like feeding grapefruits to the cows”) and chaotic young adult years (“Garbage island/ Fucking in the moonlight”).
“That was the first song from this record that I wrote—before Life on Earth even came out,” Segarra says. “It really felt like, ‘Oh, I’m getting somewhere.’ It was deep in lockdown, and I was really inspired by Kendrick Lamar—he’s such a fucking genius, and I thought, ‘Damn, I want to have bars! I want to go on a ride.’ It just freed me, being like, ‘Fuck a chorus. I just want to write and see where it goes, as a mediation.’
“That’s a perfect example of a song I looked at so differently when I got to the studio,” they continue, recalling how it was almost too emotional to record. “I just wanted to share this snapshot of my family—a working-class family that has a bunch of trauma and a bunch of conflicts but also are these really interesting people. I was really trying to give them something that honored this time, and even inside jokes that they’d be able to hear and go, ‘Oh, I remember that.’ Then it leads into the rest of my life—and also escaping that and feeling like, ‘I can’t just be this. This works for you guys, but it really doesn’t work for me, and I can’t even explain why it doesn’t. I’m not who I’m supposed to be when I’m here.’”
That sentiment—of fleeing one home while running toward the mystery of another—seems to encapsulate Segarra’s music. It’s a delicate balancing act of darkness and dreamlike wistfulness. Like the aura of the desert, these feelings are too grand to articulate clearly. But Hurray for the Riff Raff make as compelling an attempt as any.
Thinking about the overarching spirit of their music, Segarra mentions a “traveler” mindset. “We have to walk eight miles, so we’re just gonna do this,” they say. “We have heavy packs on, but we can still find beauty and be together in it and make jokes. I feel a lot of that. I don’t want people to think I’m toxic positive about the future. Shit’s pretty crazy right now. But I feel so lucky to know so many radically minded people. I always have a belief in humankind. I don’t know if we’ll win, but I do think we’re gonna make really beautiful shit along the way.”
The post Hurray for the Riff Raff: Road Maps appeared first on Relix Media.
