JOURNAL EXCERPT: Community Carried Hurray for the Riff Raff Through Grief on ‘The Past Is Still Alive’

EDITOR’S NOTE: In honor of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s nomination for Album of the Year in the 2024 Americana Honors & Awards, we’re sharing an excerpt of a profile about them in our Spring 2024 issue of No Depression. You can read the whole story — and much more — in that issue, available for purchase in digital or print format here. And please consider supporting No Depression with a subscription for more roots music journalism all year long.

Time does strange things on The Past Is Still Alive, the ninth studio album by Hurray for the Riff Raff. Singer, songwriter, and frontperson Alynda Mariposa Segarra simply bends time to their will, seeking to understand the juxtaposition of past, present, and future.

Segarra first earned national recognition with 2014’s electrifying Small Town Heroes that same year, an album that bottled the energy of old-time music and folk, shook it up with urgent political messaging of environmental justice and LGBTQ+ rights, and let the potent combination fizz once uncorked.

That energy has carried Segarra as they’ve explored different genres while mining their past, rooted in the punk communities of New York, New Orleans, the Bay Area, and the train cars that carried them between those places. The Past Is Still Alive, released in February via Nonesuch Records, finds Segarra calculating what that all adds up to — the sum of their parts.

‘Little Ghosts’

Segarra grew up in the Bronx, the second child of two Puerto Rican educators. Their father, Jose Enrico Segarra, was a jazz musician and a Vietnam vet who struggled with PTSD.

And their mother, Ninfa Segarra, served as the president of the New York City Board of Education before she dissolved it during the Giuliani administration, enforcing politics and policies that were much more conservative than young Alynda’s.

It was a difficult environment for a young person with a self-described “baby boy soul” to grow up. As a result, Segarra spent much of their teenage years in the vibrant punk and DIY communities of the Lower East Side, particularly around Tompkins Square Park. It wasn’t long before Segarra began hopping trains to New Orleans and the Bay Area.

“When I go to New York [now], I see so much of my past transferred onto what I’m looking at,” they say. “Some things have changed so much: I’ll see a fro-yo shop or something and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I used to drink there on the sidewalk!’”

They continue, “I talk about that world a lot in this record because it was the beginning of me starting a community in the punk scene and learning how to find a path out of the life that I was living.”

This dynamic is most poignant in “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive).” The peppy acoustic guitars, adventurous horns and strings, and enveloping vocals give the song a gentle golden hue — a fondness for the past with no trace of nostalgia. Here, Segarra shares snapshots of their childhood as well as reveling in the crust punk hedonism of their youth:

Campfire on the Superfund site
Garbage Island
Fucking in the moonlight
Play my song for the barrel of freaks
And we go shoplifting when it’s time to eat
They don’t really know my name
So happy that we escaped from where we came

Many of the places and people in these memories are now gone, lost to drugs, suicide, and gentrification. Segarra found that holding these memories close only caused the good memories to slip away as trauma blanked out the rest. “I’ve lived this life that I’m very proud of, but I also don’t know what to do with a lot of these precious memories because they’re so sacred to me and I don’t want to exploit them or commodify them.”

For Segarra, The Past Is Still Alive is an attempt to ensure that these memories are preserved for posterity: “My relationship with New York is has become so much about allowing change to flow through me. I’m faced with my mortality. I see little ghosts.”

Grief and Love

Segarra found that their Bronx and Puerto Rican roots made them stand out in the folk music world. While people often associate Segarra with stereotypes of the South Bronx — the poverty, gang violence, and danger of the streets — they actually grew up in the middle- and working-class neighborhood surrounding Van Cortlandt Park in the northern end of the borough.

“People are confused by my upbringing, or they tokenize it. It becomes kind of a fetishization,” they say. “When I put out Small Town Heroes, people asked, ‘How did a little Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx end up playing this music?’ I’m just like, ‘Have you ever heard of the folk revival that happened in New York City?’ … Also, I have the internet!”

Their next album, 2017’s The Navigator, was a genre-spanning tour de force, a concept record that imagines a magical realist journey through the Bronx, with working-class people of color banished to a gentrifying neighborhood called Rican Beach. Segarra is working with their friend, playwright C. Julian Jiménez, to turn The Navigator into a musical, and an early reading took place at Joe’s Pub last June, just a short walk from those same Lower East Side stomping grounds of Segarra’s youth.

In 2022, Segarra surprised longtime fans with the experimental Life on Earth. Produced by Brad Cook, the album finds Segarra delving into electronic music and spoken word, with a reading by acclaimed poet Ocean Vuong on the song “nightqueen.”

But when Segarra reunited with Cook in 2023, they knew things would be different on their next project: Segarra’s father had passed away in February, a month before they recorded The Past Is Still Alive. Segarra and their father had always connected through each other’s music, with Jose cheering on Alynda throughout their career. Segarra had written many of these songs during lockdown, and only realized later how much of them were about their father.

Before Jose passed, Segarra had used writing and touring to numb their past trauma. But facing their grief also meant facing their ineffective coping mechanisms. “As Americans, we don’t talk about grief enough,” Segarra says. “This experience really knocked a lot of pride out of me — pride that had me thinking, ‘I don’t want to bother anybody. I don’t want to be too much. I don’t want to be that friend who always needs something.’”

As a result, Segarra leaned heavily on their collaborators during the recording sessions for The Past Is Still Alive. Closeness with drummer Yan Westerlund, a longtime member of Hurray for the Riff Raff, and Cook, returning to produce, proved comfortable and familiar. But newer bonds with contributing musicians Meg Duffy on guitar, Libby Rodenbough on fiddle, Matt Douglas on saxophone, and multi-instrumentalist Phil Cook became vital as well.

“There’s something really important about reaching out to my friends and saying, ‘I don’t know how to do this,’” Segarra says. “There’s a lot of insight that you can get if you’re allowed to have the space and time and support.”

As the producer, Cook helped recruit musicians like Rodenbough (part of the North Carolina stringband Mipso and a solo artist) and prep them for the emotional weight of the sessions. Though they were only together for a few hours of recording, Rodenbough was impressed by what she saw as Segarra’s willingness to let go: “They had an ease, a sense that they know that life is bigger than a single record cycle. Part of what makes them an artist is being able to be deeply emotionally present with whatever their current work is.”

Such trust and communication among collaborators and friends helped Segarra let their guard down in ways, pushing aside their drive to prove what they could accomplish and focusing on the songs in front of them: “I fell in love again with writing songs and I fell in love with poetry again and just being able to rest in words.”

This joy is evident especially in the collaborations on the album. Duets with S.G. Goodman (“Dynamo”), Conor Oberst (“The World is Dangerous”), and Anjimile (“Ogallala”) unfurl like landscapes viewed from the boxcar of a train, the voices complementing each other with gentle inevitability.

Work Ahead

For as much as Segarra sees The Past Is Still Alive as capturing specific crossroads in their life, the record also serves as a broader political statement. As a teenager, they supported the post-9/11 anti-war movement and rallied against New York City’s brutal gentrification measures enacted in the name of “counterterrorism.” Segarra rode with Critical Mass, a monthly group bike ride that advocated for safer (and greener) infrastructure for bicyclists in New York City, and organized with Food Not Bombs, a collective that distributes free vegetarian and vegan food across the country.

“Ogallala,” the album’s last song, weaves these causes together in a climactic flourish powered by New Orleans horns, swaying steel guitars, and the hypnotic pulse of Segarra’s electronic music. It’s a collapsing of their individual past, present, and future as they deliver pronouncements about what’s at stake for humanity — fear of climate change, political repression, inspiration from loved ones, and radical hope to carry themselves and listeners through the challenges ahead.

As Rodenbough says, “You come away from this album feeling like there’s work to be done, and we can do it. We’re still alive.”

Segarra believes that the work ahead is rooted in building meaningful relationships with each other.

“People in the generation older than me were constantly telling me that blood family is what is important and that friends come and go. We need to get rid of that concept,” they say. “Community is so important. [Writer and activist] adrienne maree brown talks about like digging in, not out — going deep with people and really giving and also understanding that you deserve that type of care as well. Being a lonely famous person is not going to get me through the apocalypse.”