Alynda Segarra: Hurray for the Riff Raff

The Past is Still Alive strikes me as a historical and geographical album.

It's me looking back on my experience of living, being a human. I feelLife on Earth, the record I made right before this one, was also reflective, but it was very “big picture” and about my relationship to nature. I spend a lot of time looking outside of myself in my writing. And this was me grappling with memory. My memory isn't bad, I'm learning, but it's different [from] my friends. I have a hard time remembering geographic locations. I'll ask, "Where were we? What year was it?" So, it was me trying to pin down my life, and pin down fleeting memories and moments of time that I didn't want to lose. I felt they were slipping through my fingers or something. I started to go in and exercise my memory and think, "Well, even if this is fleeting, I can stick it in there." It changed my writing style: it's a lot more of little "clippets." I ended up really liking how that sounds.

It feels personal and humanist. There are some powerfully compassionate lines in there – in "Alibi," especially. It's such a call to live. That's a recurring theme throughout the tracks on the album of an encouraging message to keep fighting and to embrace life.

My dad passed away unexpectedly a month before recording this. Suddenly, everything was about him. I think that's what it is: We might not have all the answers, but living is a worthy thing to fight for. That started to feel so much more powerful after my dad's passing, [after] being struck with death and its reality.

It feels oriented toward the individual but also the collective. A summoning of folks who don't feel like they have worth, or anyone who's teetering on the edge.

Brad [Cook and I] had a conversation about [the song] "Snake Plant [(The Past is Still Alive)]," where I sang, "There's a war on our people, what don't you understand?" Brad asked, “What about, 'There's a war onthepeople, because it's not justourpeople.’" It struck me, and it's made me think about how much self-harm and self-hatred harms other people. Learning how to love myself makes me a less harmful person. It's okay to change and to go through the process of being brought to a humble place.

How has your relationship to making music changed as you've evolved and claimed new parts of yourself?

I was thinking about this this morning, actually. I'm so excited to write songsfor menow. I used to want to prove things to people, the outside view at large. [Now] I'm at a place where I'm excited to go further and further inward. I didn't consider my inward journey [to be] of note, even though that's what I love about songwriters. And I love grappling with bigger macro issues, too, but I'm excited about the vulnerability and the discovery that will happen writing for myself. Also, you'll notice on this album I wrote some songs that don't have choruses. That's another thing I'm excited about; to give myself free rein and see where I end up.

Writing choruses is so hammered into us. It can be freeing to allow yourself to do what's not necessarily going to be seen as marketable or popular.

On this record, "Colossus [of Roads]" is a song that I'm most proud of, and I feel like it was because I freed myself of any restraints with it.

Percussion is such a character on this album.

Totally.

There's even a line in "Buffalo" where you "bought a drum from a man who cried."

My lyricism on this record is funny to me, because it's plainly descriptive of what happened. The guy really cried. [laughs] He sold us a drum. The drummer [on the album] is my drummer on tour, YanWesterlund. But I play the shakers on the album, so I have to take credit for that.

Heck yeah, you do! What was your decision-making on the instrumentation for this album?

We kept it extremely simple. Brad [and I] talked about how we got far out onLife on Earth, and we wanted to zero in now. We had this image of what we were trying to create, and then life happened – death happened. I was so in another realm. I was deep in grief and not all there. It was only a total of about ten days, so a lot of decisions were made quickly and reactively, around a lot of musicians that I trust. I [had] already toured around the world with Yan, and I trusted him. I [had] already made a record with Brad, so I trusted him, and I had worked with the engineer [Paul Voran]. Also, Phil Cook, who is Brad's brother and an incredible musician, played dobro, guitar, and keys. I was around people that I already knew. I didn't have to anxiously worry about them. I was able to immediately be like, “I like that. I don't like that,” or, “I don't know. I'm overwhelmed. I'm in a fog.” That's where [my] relationship [with Brad] was so important: Me being able to feel, “I trust you. I know that you have the best intentions for this.”

It sounds like you felt very held in that space.

Yeah, everybody came there with intentional energy. A lot of my process was being very reactive, which is hard for me. It's my nightmare to be like, “I'm a mess, and I'm just going tell you honestly what I think with no filter.” But it was also really freeing, and I hope I can live more aligned [with] that.

You utilize some beautiful harmonies in your work. How did you develop your ear?

This is definitely something that I had the most fun with. When I started to makeLife on Earth, I was feeling very blocked – not in touch with my body or my voice – and I went through a transformation with that record. So, coming into this, it felt like anything was possible. It was a joy. I don't think about harmonies in a technical way. I'll not be able to tell you what they are, but I will be able to sing them. Some of the most fun that [Brad and I] had was him saying, “Wait, what about this crazy note? Put that in there.” We would listen to songs, I would start singing harmonies, and he'd say, “Whoa. Yeah, that one.” It was a lot of bouncing off of each other.

Whose harmonies do you gravitate towards as inspiration?

It comes from listening to a lot of early American folk music when I was first starting to write – a lot of Alan Lomax recordings – and also living in the deep South for so long, hearing early gospel music. I definitely love Irish ballads. I love a weird harmony that feels sweet, but also a little bit sorrowful. And, of course, I feel like listening to Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings [Tape Op#85] taught me alot. Another influence is early Bob Marley and the Wailers. Those harmonies are amazing, and they were being influenced by doo-wop.

What's your relationship to recording gear?

I'm learning about it. My relationship to music was very much [based on] what I could carry on my back, in a very literal way, playing on the street and playing folk music. I've learned how to feel less intimidated. It's been a really big blockage. I'm still at a point where I’m at my happiest when everything's already set up, and I can just come in and play. Setting it all up still makes me scream. But I feel I finally zeroed in, after all of these years, on a good acoustic guitar sound. That's exciting to me. I'm starting to experiment a little bit more. I went on tour with a [Roland] SP-404 [sampler]. It acted as another part of my brain; a library of quotes that I like, parts of movies that I like, or parts of poems – people speaking. That was fun to load up and play random bits in between songs. I feel certain things are starting to influence my writing and give me more open avenues. I was starting to feel very locked in with just an acoustic guitar. So, it's been nice to play around with gear. I have a [teenage engineering] OP-1 [synth], too. That's insanely fun to get lost in.

That's awesome. What's the programming credit you have onLife on Earth's"KiN"?

That was actually a field recording.

You have a programming credit on Tidal for that one.

Hilarious! That's a perfect example of my relationship with gear. KiN is a tree in New Orleans that's an art piece. It's this beautiful, hundreds of years old oak tree. It has these giant wind chimes all over it, so it's always playing music with the wind. [Placed by artist Jim Hart. Ed.] I got obsessed with this tree and would go visit it every day, so I recorded it on my iPhone. That's me, out in the world, collaborating with the tree. [laughs] I was saying, "This is my favorite living musician." It's like going to an ambient show, but it's a tree.

There's also a lyric that you have in “Buffalo”; the chorus about it taking “two weeks to catch the buffalo,” and it’s revealed in the second verse that “catch the buffalo” means to catch theaudioof the buffalo stampede.

That was a guy that I met in Santa Fe, [New Mexico], who has a store of instruments. He was showing me his field recordings, because he said that he had a record where he was collaborating with nature in a musical way. I was like, “Wait, what?I'mtrying to do that.” He told me this whole story about how he wanted to capture, on audio, the buffalo stampede. How the buffalo represented – to him – this species that was almost totally extinct, and how they were able to survive, and how that resonated with him as a Native American person. It was such a touching experience, meeting this man and hearing his recording, and I couldn't get the story out of my head. Then it goes into this bigger story of trying to be in love at this time in the world. Maybe it's always been difficult. Being in love, you're on borrowed time, because eventually all these elements of our culture are going to seep in and make it so hard to keep this pure thing pure. But we want to be like, “We can do this. We can survive.”

It’s beautiful that it relates to being in love, because I had interpreted it as our species continuing to exist on this planet. And recording guarantees the survival of songs, unless the masters are destroyed and the internet dies.

I know. That's why I'm like, "We'll need to remember them in our heads," which I'd like to encourage all of us to do. I feel I'm not doing enough of that.

I had a lot of urgency about recording everything during the early days of the pandemic, because I worried, “What if this gets me and I don't have my songs down to pass on to my family?” I've had dreams that I've died and I'm trying to beam my songs down to people on Earth.

Yeah, and like you’re saying, sending people your songs is proof of your life. I think that's what a lot of this record was for me, because I do feel like it's an ending. People say the death of a parent is like a hinge: There's a before and an after. I feel like I'm starting a new chapter in my life. Also, at this age, I'm starting to feel like I'm not a kid anymore in the ways where I'm thinking, “Wow, I'm safe. That's wild. I'm able to care for myself.” So, I wanted to honor what has already happened for me. This was my version of “beaming it down,” and also a historical marker of outsider culture, for lack of a better term. These people that I’ve met are so beautiful, and a lot of them aren't around anymore. A lot of them, people don't know. How do I honor these people who are all so unique, interesting, and impactful on me?

Like Miss Jonathan, from your song "Hawkmoon"?

Yeah, I keep wondering if she's going to be out there still and hear an interview with me. It's really my dream, thatthatis what happens. Someone like her is such a legend to me. I met her when I was 17 and homeless in New Orleans, and we had the best time together. She totally fucking opened up my mind and opened a doorway, just [by] being herself. It took me all these years to find a way to put her in a song, and I've been wanting to for so long. I've always tried, and it never quite worked. And then it magically did.

hurrayfortheriffraff.com

Meredith Hobbs Coons is a singer-songwriter (Lamb’s Ear, blue ghosts) and freelance journalist (The A.V. Club,Aquarium Drunkard,Talkhouse,The Washington Post). She co-hosts and edits the podcastWilco Will Love You.meredithhobbscoons.com