Hurray For The Riff Raff – The Past Is Still Alive
There’s been a painful amount of talk in recent weeks about what exactly “country music” is and isn’t. The “isn’t” part, in particular, seems unnecessarily gatekeeper-y. To me, it’s always been about storytelling – I don’t need pedal steel or fiddle if you’re telling me a good tale (although – both instruments always help!) Give me a story that’s unique, but somehow also universal, and I’ll call you country. Alynda Segarra’s story – a Puerto Rican kid raised in the Bronx by their aunt and uncle before leaving New York as a teen to hop trains, make music and find their own community – isn’t one you’ll hear on the radio, and it’s one that Segarra, through their band Hurray for the Riff Raff, hesitated to tell in full. But on their new album, The Past is Still Alive, Segarra drops their long-fabled history into a gorgeous set of songs that hinge on the kind of displacement experienced by anyone who’s ever felt “othered,” and it may very well end up being the most empathetic record anyone puts out this year.
Segarra begins their album (and their story) in New York with the pleasant-sounding country ambler “Alibi.” Set against acoustic-and-organ jangle and the “choppers and the buzzing cars” of a busy city, Segarra confronts a drug-addicted friend – “Thawing out my heart like meat/I see your track marks poking through your hoodie sleeve” – with unsentimental honesty: “‘Cause you don’t have to die if you don’t wanna die.” Segarra also addresses drug addiction – this time on a larger scale – on the subtly driving “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive).” With Matt Douglas’ baritone sax providing a foundation, Segarra pairs images of innocent childhood trips – “Soft hands, gold rings/Try to remember most everything” – with the sad reality of being a largely unmoored grown-up: “Test your drugs/Remember Narcan/There’s a war on the people/What don’t you understand?”
The Past Is Still Alive reads like a catalog of what some might call “youthful indiscretions,” but for Segarra, it was just life, in all its road-weary messiness with glimpses of happiness. The gorgeously melancholy “Hourglass” finds the singer flashing back to times of desperation – “I always feel like a dirty kid/I used to eat out of the garbage” – before the panic subsides and Segarra readjusts to their present – “And suddenly a boulder/Is just sand/In an hourglass.” “The World is Dangerous,” a late-night ballad that pairs Segarra with Conor Oberst, seems like a companion piece to the title track from 2022’s LIFE ON EARTH – “Your dreams are not dreams/They’re only visions of what you need/You’re not the person you thought you’d be.” And “Ogallala,” somehow pairing pedal steel and saxophone to perfection, plays itself off as an escape that actually questions the notion of freedom that any of us might feel that we have – “I was in love/With my American footprint/Tracks of blood left out in the snow.”
The crux of the album is the Dobro-tinged “Colossus of Roads.” What begins as a sad recollection of Colorado’s Club Q shooting – “Hold my head like a live wire/Duck quick now I hear gunfire” turns into a dismissal of the myth of the American Dream – “Say goodbye to America/I wanna see it dissolve” before finding just a little bit of hope eternal in love: “You will live forever as this bombshell/In my mind.” These bizarre bits of happiness are what make The Past Is Still Alive the post-democracy wonder that it is. Flashing back to Ogallala, Segarra sings, against an instrumental cacophony of…everything, “I used to think I was born/Into the wrong generation/But now I know/I made it right on time/To watch the world burn.” Segarra has, whether they intended it or not, left us a beautiful, heartbreaking soundtrack (country or otherwise) for the end of the world.
Song I Can’t Wait to Hear Live: “Hawkmoon” – spiced up by fantastic guitar work from Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and a driving beat, Segarra tells the story of Miss Jonathan, a trans woman from New Orleans and a truly transformational person in their life, while tossing out of of this year’s best lines: “I’m becoming the kind of girl/They warned me about.”
The Past Is Still Alive was produced by Brad Cook, engineered by Cook and Paul Voran, mixed by Mike Mogis and mastered by Heba Kadry. All songs were written by Alynda Segarra. Musicians on the album include Segarra (lead and harmony vocals, acoustic guitar, shaker), Brad Cook (bass guitar, acoustic guitar, Wurlitzer, pocket piano, OP-1 synth, vibraphone), Phil Cook (electric guitar, piano, organ, Dobro, marimba), Yan Westerlund (drums, tambourine), Mike Mogis (pedal steel, synth bass, synths), Meg Duffy (electric guitars, synth guitar, slide guitar, harmony vocals), Matt Douglas (baritone and tenor sax), Libby Rodenbough (fiddle), and SG Goodman, Conor Oberst and Anjimile (harmony vocals).
Go here to order The Past Is Still Alive (out February 23): https://shop.merchcentral.com/collections/hurray-for-the-riff-raff
Check out tour dates here: http://www.hurrayfortheriffraff.com/tour-copy
