The Past Is Still Alive, the new album from Hurray for the Riff Raff, is the folk outfit’s eleventh release since 2007. But Alynda Segarra, the musician behind the project, sees the release as more of a sophomore effort, after 2022’s Life on Earth marked the turning over of a new leaf.
“In some ways, I feel like this is my second record in this chapter of my life, getting out of a traumatized, hypervigilant childhood,” they tell me over Zoom from a room at the Hotel Chelsea. “And it feels really good.”
The album’s title is a sentiment intimately familiar to any survivor of hard times, and Segarra is certainly no stranger to trouble. The singer-songwriter’s mythology as a runaway who left home at 17 and trainhopped their way to New Orleans is extensively documented in press interviews. But it took Segarra a fair amount of healing to feel comfortable actually opening up about their life in their music, which they do on The Past Is Still Alive in tender, intimately rendered detail. From their first encounter with a trans woman to a rallying cry for people to carry Narcan, the songs on the record are woven with all of the grief, rage and love that has carried Segarra and their beloved “riff raff” through a world that pushes them to the margins.
The Past Is Still Alive is also just a damn good Americana record with all the makings of an instant folk classic. Like the best singers in the genre, Segarra’s velvety voice makes you feel as though they’re speaking to you directly, perhaps recounting a story by a campfire. Cowboy chords strummed on an acoustic guitar power most of the LP’s 11 songs, sometimes accented only by a lone backing vocal, drums, and bass, and other times lushly layered with saxophone, fiddle, organ, pedal steel, and more.
Below, the artist chats with Them about their many literary influences, the importance of documenting the subcultures that raised them, and how their nonbinary identity influenced their songwriting.
“The Past Is Still Alive” is such an evocative statement. What does that sentiment mean to you, and what does it mean in the context of the album?
This record was so much about me looking back and really investigating my experience of memory. I feel like my friends have a different type of memory than me: I will have emotional memories but not remember where we were. I was feeling like my experiences were slipping through my fingers because I couldn’t make a timeline of them. This became a way for me to feel like everything I experienced really happened. These fleeting moments that I had in my mind and in my body, I was making a box for all of them.
I lost my dad really suddenly right before the record. I already had the title but then all of a sudden it was like, “Oh, yes, it’s also about honoring these people who aren’t here anymore, but are such a huge part of my life,” and feeling like they actually are still with me and everything that’s happened is is still here in a way. It’s also about the history of our country, and the history of landscapes. All of that history is still being made and what happened is still a part of what’s happening now and what will happen.
The album description says that you open up about your life on this record more than ever before. What were some of the ways that you did that on the record, and what made you feel comfortable enough to do that?
I talk on this record about moments and parts of community that I found throughout my life that are really sacred to me, and I was really scared of sharing those. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the listener. It’s that I didn’t trust the whole machine of selling music. I felt really nervous about letting some sacred moments or memories or people out into the world because I thought they would just get used up and commodified or something.
I felt finally ready to be like, “I think that I know how to do this in a way where I trust myself to do this artistically and to protect the contents with the writing.” Something clicked that I could do it, like how all these other artists that I admire have.
What made that click for you?
I think recognizing how fragile life is. Also throughout early lockdown, I was thinking about history and people and movements and scenes and art communities getting written down in history or somehow cataloged so that they can be remembered. I was feeling nervous that people who I thought were really important who had passed away, or movements that I was a part of when I was younger in New York, were not getting written down in the history books. Then I read this book that was really important for the writing of this album called It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful. It’s about ACT UP and about [the AIDS activist art collective] Gran Fury. It started to feel way more important to me to be somebody who’s writing down a moment in time, and memorializing people.
Who were some of the people you sought to memorialize on the record?
A specific person is Miss Jonathan in the song “Hawkmoon,” who is the first trans woman I ever met. I was 17 and I was still a runaway. Meeting her and becoming best friends and feeling really safe with her and rolling around in her crazy, illegal car — she really had such a huge impact on me.
In “Snake Plant,” I talk about a campfire at the Superfund site. I can go there immediately in my mind and see all the people who I knew and the school bus that people were living in and hear the songs that people were sharing. And also being like, “Well, we were on a toxic site where people were dumping garbage.” That moment was really important to me, because this is what we’re given at this moment in history. We’re given sites that are full of toxic chemicals and we are finding a way to create. It becomes more of a symbol. We’re finding ways to create beauty and art in the midst of that because we can’t change what we’re being given but we can try to continue to have relationships and move forward.
You’re very open about being nonbinary but it’s not something you discuss much in interviews. Would you be open to talking about that today?
It’s the perfect record for it. Lyrically, I really fuck around with gender in a way that finally felt so embodied for me. It all came together.
Embodied in what ways?
I just felt more confident and less confused and timid. Honestly, I’ve seen pictures of Eileen Myles before but I read this book that I namecheck in “Colossus” called I Must Be Living Twice. It’s a really incredible photo of Eileen on the cover, and seeing it did something for me. It just felt like a door opening. That’s why I thought it was so important to mention them in my writing.
But even referring to myself as a boy scared me a little bit. In my early experiences of being interviewed, people were very confused about what queer was and I felt like they were very confused by me. No matter how hard I tried, I found myself really trying to be whatever they wanted me to be. In my writing this time around, I was finally speaking a little more plainly and not as concerned with if it confused someone. I really love this line in “Snake Plant”: “I was born with a baby boy’s soul.” Then also in “Hawkmoon,” I’m like, “I’m becoming the kind of girl that they’ve warned me about.” I just felt like I was able to play with gender in a way that felt more free for me, even if people don’t understand that.
Is this the first time that you’ve played around with gender like that in your music?
In my very early records, there are lyrics like that. I’ve done my own version of that, but I didn’t have the language for myself yet. I did an interview with Gender Reveal, which is a podcast I really love, where I said, “For so long, I feel like I was just a huge fan of trans people. Like I’m a really big fan. And then suddenly, I was like, ‘Maybe there’s something going on here.’” I’m on my own journey, but on this record, the language came together in a way that made sense.
Also with the photos that we did for the album cover, my friend Tommy Kha did a really amazing job of presenting me the way that I saw myself. I’m trying to do this James Dean in a cowboy hat, River Phoenix, sad boy out in the desert stuff. It felt really amazing to see a photo and be like, “That’s what I felt in my head that I was worried people would laugh at.”
How does queerness as a whole inform your songwriting?
It’s been one of the foundations of my songwriting for sure. When I first started writing songs, I was 18 and I really wanted to add to American folk music but queer it. I was also learning that these classic blues women like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey were queer, and they were writing songs about crossdressing. I just felt this excitement about being like, “That’s what I want to do with my writing: take these histories that people are trying to bury and bring them out.”
The other thing is I started writing songs because I wanted to have community. I wanted to meet people and give something back to people who had helped keep me alive. This was the best way I knew how.
In a general sense, what do you hope people take away from the record?
I hope that it gives people a space to feel their grief where they feel safe. There are so many different types of grief that we’re all experiencing, and I’ve learned a lot from the grief that I experienced and am still experiencing. It’s been so humbling. It took away this hyperindividual thing that I had of [telling myself], “I’m okay, I’m okay.” All of a sudden it was like, “I need to fall apart. I need my friends to be there for me. This is bigger than me. I can’t think my way out of this.” I hope that people who are experiencing any type of grief can find some kind of space where time stands still while they listen to this record.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Past Is Still Alive is available now via Nonesuch Records.
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