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The Folk Artist Everyone is Writing About

The Folk Artist Everyone is Writing About

Public Opinion
September 06, 2024

A Note from Jack

Sometimes the universe points you towards something and in the past few months it has pointed me towards Alynda Segarra, who performs as Hurray for the Riff Raff. I connected with Alynda at some point over the winter in Astor Place where they crushed a round of Track Star and told me an interesting story about the strange funeral of Gram Parsons. I told Alynda about our hopes to launch a sessions series and invited them to perform at some point. Their album hadn’t come out yet but when it did it Pitchfork named it best new music and gave a glowing review. My review: it’s really fucking good. Fast forward to the summer and we got a chance to do Presents. At the same time I realized that Matthew who writes for us has previously written about Alynda for Pitchfork… The universe at work. Of course he wrote about them again and the session came out this week and got some more nice press in Stereogum. I really do have the coolest job in the world.

Hurray for the Riff Raff - The Past is Still Alive

By Matthew Ismael Ruiz

On their latest LP The Past is Still Alive, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra sings about shoplifting, eating out of the garbage, and fucking in the moonlight, vivid flashes of memory from a wayward youth spent riding the rails and living on the streets. Segarra ran away from home in the Bronx at 17, obsessed with Woody Guthrie and exploring the country via back roads and backyards, lured by romantic notions of a small town America that seemed a world away from their life in New York.

Segarra started making music after settling in New Orleans, immersed in a city overflowing with spiritual energy and musical tradition. Their first songs were deeply rooted in the American folk tradition, colored by banjos, washboards, and harmonicas, telling stories with the aid of a sharp eye and a tender heart. But early records such as Look Out Mama and Small Town Heroes rarely veered into the specifically autobiographical, instead exploring love, death, and the spirits through colorful ciphers.

Segarra’s 2017 album The Navigator begins to address their own story more directly, albeit through an alter ego named Navita Milagros Negrón, a Puerto Rican street kid who visits a bruja to escape the oppressive confines of their hometown. When Navi returns home years later, they find an altered landscape, new residents, and the ghosts of a lost youth—not unlike Segarra themselves, returning to the Bronx after years on the road. The record also marks a tonal shift for Hurray for the Riff Raff, as Segarra expands their songwriting palette to include Caribbean instruments and rhythms, working with larger ensembles and new collaborators. She would later script and produce the story for the stage, translating Navi’s story into a bit of musical dinner theater for a limited run of performances in New York.

The Past is Still Alive is considerably more literal, however, with people, places, and textures harvested directly from memory. A campsite built on a Superfund site; tracks of blood in the Nebraska snow; a car ride with a beloved mentor; feeding cows grapefruits; a confession from a friend suffering from addiction; getting lost in the poetry aisle of a San Francisco bookstore. They’re vignettes from a life lived with fearless naivete that slowly hardened into wisdom, told from the rearview by an artist who has come to realize that you never really leave your past behind. “This record is like a love letter to all of those places and people that took me in at a very vulnerable time in my life, and protected me and taught me,” they told NPR earlier this year.

While Segarra may still feel like that dirty kid in a hobo band, remembering their dumpster diving days while rubbing shoulders with the privileged, at this stage in their career, it’s no exaggeration to call them one of the great songwriters of their generation. Having studied and practiced the American folk tradition, they have carved out a sound that embodies their own story—one part electric, two parts acoustic, with several lifetimes worth of chords and characters to draw you into their world, without a worry of how you might get back.