‘It’s a violent time to be human’: Hurray for the Riff Raff on making joyful music under fire
Alynda Lee Segarra is practising radical joy. The musician – better known as Hurray for the Riff Raff – has decided to embrace happiness in spite of this era’s particular horrors. “This is a violent time to be a human – it’s kind of always a violent time to be a human,” they explain over Zoom from their airy New Orleans home. “How do we stay present, how do we intensely feel joy, and not just the crushing weight of it all?”
The answer is trees. “We’re hit with hurricanes every year yet plant life is thriving. It was very comforting to look at these living beings and be like: ‘I don’t know how to survive this. How the fuck do you survive this?’” they say, recounting pandemic-induced walks around their lush local landscape. Growing up in a cramped apartment in the Bronx, New York City, they felt the natural world was reserved for “very wealthy people who go on elaborate vacations. It felt like a class divide.” Now, plants aren’t just offering Segarra strength and solace – they’re also helping them craft a whole new genre.
“Nature punk” is how Segarra refers to their forthcoming eighth album, Life on Earth, the follow-up to 2017’s ravereviewed The Navigator. It includes a scrappy, swaggering, Lou Reed-reminiscent homage to the rhododendron, while closer Kin sees Segarra collaborate with a wind chime-draped tree which they describe as their “favourite experimental musician”.
Yet what’s most impressive about Life on Earth is not the unusual credit list, but the way Segarra metabolises bleak and disturbing subjects into songs that brim with hope, beauty and cheer. Opener Wolves is a soaring, soothing, synth-peppered slice of heartland rock that alludes to climate catastrophe. On Precious Cargo, the refugee crisis is movingly – but somehow not despairingly – evoked in lyrics about journeying through the jungle only to face the inhumane conditions of US detention centres.
That song is based on the testimony of two men Segarra met a few years ago while volunteering for an organisation that supports asylum seekers in Ice detention facilities. It was a move prompted by the musician feeling that they were “getting pummelled by the news. I was like I have all this fucking free time and I’m just feeling bad for myself and the world: let me go do something.” Eventually, the men were released, and one of them provides Precious Cargo’s coda, in which he asks people to keep helping refugees: “I asked what his message to the world was and that’s what he decided on. It’s really beautiful.”
Also beautiful is Jupiter’s Dance, a sticky, bristling pop song that offers comfort to immigrant children. It features the rhythms of the Puerto Rican music Segarra heard as a child: after years spent overlooking their heritage, they began incorporating such influences into their rootsy, folksy sound on The Navigator. Life on Earth moves their sound on again into something slicker and synthier, partly thanks to producer Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Snail Mail), whom Segarra describes as a lovingly encouraging figure with a “Ted Lasso vibe”. In the past, their work has usually been labelled Americana, but the musician feels increasingly alienated from that genre. “The Americana world feels so oppressive to me – a world that doesn’t want to hear the truth about how hard it is to be alive. It makes things very pretty.”
As a teenager, it was punk and the friendly community around it that captured Segarra’s imagination. “I was part of an acoustic punk band that was very embarrassing, but because in New York we have such small spaces I couldn’t practise the electric guitar. I shared a room with my aunt, she would have been like, ‘this is so annoying!’” Born to Nuyorican (New York Puerto Rican) parents – their father was a music teacher and their mother served as one of New York’s deputy mayors in the 90s – Segarra lived with their aunt and uncle until the age of 17, when they left to travel the US and play music in a street band. “I was in this world of wanting to live outside of society, that was my biggest dream, to not pay rent or pay for anything and have no money. I felt like I would be crushed by trying to join the world and have a job.” The preferred mode of transport was freight-hopping – the illegal and very dangerous practice of sneaking on to freight trains. “I look back and think how the fuck did I do that? Because now I’m so neurotic,” they shudder.
The pandemic gave Segarra space to process the trauma of that time. “These very physical memories would wash over me, all this stillness and silence brought up a lot.” They found that EMDR – a form of therapy that uses buzzers and blinking lights to divest certain memories of their distressing effect – helped. “I’d been doing talk therapy for many years, and I can intellectualise something all day, but I was just like: why do I still feel like I’m crawling out of my skin?”
This period of healing has also altered their approach to touring. Previously, they had high expectations of themself: “I wanted to perform well, I wanted to give people hope. Now I want to go in being like, I’m a human and all I can do is be present with you.” As they prepare to head back out on the road, Segarra is hoping to take the lessons of the last two locked-down years with them; the realisation that “it’s OK for me to just get through today, it’s OK if all I did today was make a really nice meal”. As their profoundly heartening new album proves, they achieved an awful lot more than that.
•Life on Earth is released via Nonesuch on 18 February.