Hurray for the Riff Raff on the Radical Mind Shift That Led to New Album Life on Earth

Hurray for the Riff Raff has one of those discographies that’s hard to wrap your head around. Alynda Segarra has been performing under the name since 2007, around the time they landed in New Orleans after leaving the Bronx as a teenager and riding freight trains across the U.S. There were years of busking and small releases before 2014’s Small Town Heroes, the album whose subtle and seemingly effortless updates to timeless country-folk songwriting forced the world beyond New Orleans to pay attention. They followed it with 2017’s The Navigator, melding salsa-inflected rhythms and Springsteenian rock’n’roll in songs that chart personal history against the backdrop of American colonialism and injustice. Depending on how you tally, Life on Earth might be Hurray for the Riff Raff’s seventh or eighth full-length. But Segarra has a simpler way of keeping track: Think of it as their first.

Zooming from their home in the Big Easy, Segarra speaks often and enthusiastically about their newfound sense of presence—a tossing-off of the trauma, perfectionism, and anxiety that had worn them down for years. The designation of Life on Earth as a kind of debut isn’t meant as a disavowal of previous work, only a recognition of this personal rebirth, and a refusal to be boxed in by the past. “I don’t want this to be the saga of my life / I just want to be free,” Segarra sings on “Saga,” buoyed by mallet percussion and ebullient backing vocals. The song, Segarra says, is about “this journey of victim to survivor to me now. I was trying to create a new pathway in my brain. How can I carry this with me? Of course, these little past Alyndas are still me, but this is the person I am now.”

The feelings of newness and departure are evident in the sound of Life on Earth, which uproots Hurray for the Riff Raff’s music from Americana (or any particular genre), with production help from indie mainstay Brad Cook. “Jupiter’s Dance,” built on a stuttering dembow beat and icy two-note synth line, is the closest Segarra has come to the sound of contemporary pop. Their vocal delivery on “Precious Cargo,” the story of a man’s detainment at an ICE facility, has more in common with hip-hop than Hank Williams. Even on songs that are ostensibly rootsier, it’s evident that something has shifted. Atop the insistent acoustic strumming of “Rhododendron,” Segarra observes the perseverance of nature with a free-associative looseness that borders on psychedelia.

There’s a post-apocalyptic strain running through Life on Earth and its accompanying visuals, but it isn’t all bad. There are flowers growing in the barren soil, and new ways of being emerge from the wreckage of the old. This will to adapt and persevere after disaster, looking forward instead of back, is the album’s connective tissue, whether the subject at hand is personal or political or both. “The world is burning,” Segarra tells me. “So there’s this urgency of: Just make the shit. It’s worth it.”

Pitchfork: Your backstory as an artist—leaving New York City as a teenager, riding freight trains for a while, busking in New Orleans—is really romantic and often retold in articles about you. Given the way that certain songs on Life on Earth are about not wanting your past to define you, I’m curious: Is any part of you tired of hearing that story?

Alynda Segarra: When I first started getting interviewed, that part of my life was so sacred to me, and I really didn’t want to exploit it, but I knew I had to play the game. I knew I couldn’t not say I rode trains. But in the way it got told, a lot of the most interesting parts, the real parts, got whitewashed. It’s hard for me, because I’d love to be able to tell more of the precious parts, or the really grimy parts of that life. It’s coming out now in the new songs I’m writing. My memory is kind of fucked anyway. I get little flashes of memories. I’m trying to piece it all together.

So it’s not like I’m tired of that story. I’m proud of who I was and what I did. It’s more like—I want to serve it better. When I would first get interviewed, I would get flashes of people I knew, older train-riders that were in that life for real, for a long time—like, facial-tattooed people. And I would see them in my head and be like, they’re gonna beat my ass! I told people the secrets about this life. So I tried my best to tell that story without giving away secrets. It’s hard. We’re all exploiting our lives. How do I do it in a way that doesn’t make me sick of myself?

A new presence. In my life, and in my body. Embodiment is a better word for it. Where I feel like I’m waking up from this coma of being dissociated, being full of nerves and unprocessed trauma.

Between you saying that, and some of the imagery and sounds, I feel like I have to ask if doing psychedelics was involved in making this record.

It wasn’t. I am so scared. And all my friends are trying to coach me there. And I respect them so much. I’m like, “Please tell me about your experiences.” I had a bad experience when I was 14 that made me be like, “You guys, I am too crazy for this shit.” I made a pact with God that I would never do them again. But that was a 14-year-old, and your brain is in such a different place. Also, I’m getting more to a place where—thinking about Michael Pollan’s writing—I’ve already delved into a lot of darkness in my mind. I don’t know if there’s stuff that’s gonna totally surprise me.

What you said earlier about opening up doors in your brain reminded me of Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind.

There was a lot of that work, even in the studio. Everything felt a little scary, a little extra vulnerable. And Brad is a very good guide for someone who’s like, “I really want to push myself, but I’m fuckin’ terrified.” He was perfect. I felt very supported and loved—and pushed.

Were you bringing in songs on guitar or piano, and then figuring out how they’re going to manifest on the record once you were in the studio?

Some of them were like that: Here’s me playing this on the guitar, I have no idea how to expand it, please help me. Some of them I already had demos that I made with my friend Kellen Harrison, who co-wrote “Pierced Arrows.” And even those: if you have demo-itis, Brad is gonna fuck with that. I made a demo of “Precious Cargo” that I was so stuck on. I listen to it now and I’m like, “This is wild. It doesn’t make sense.”

I was curious about “Jupiter’s Dance,” because that one feels so thoroughly removed from any notion of acoustic guitar singer-songwriter music.

That was the first song I wrote for the record. I wrote it on keys, and it stumped me for so long, for exactly the reason you mention. It felt like a guiding light, though, that I could show people. “This is what I wrote. It has this hook. Here’s the chords.” It felt like a good example of: I want to move somewhere new, I want to explore other territories. I had been listening to so much Bad Bunny.

We experimented a lot with the vocals on that one. That’s another thing about embodiment: I learned a lot about how connected our voices are with where we’re at in our healing process. I really tried to learn about how I could use my voice in this energetic way. Not just trying to sing pretty, and be in this perfectionist mindset. And that kind of felt like psychedelics for me. That was really pushing down barriers in my mind—about how I’m hard on myself, or how present I am. I started to realize that my state of mind affects my singing so much. Even if you can’t hear it, you can feel it.

How do those ideas manifest in the way you’re working in the studio? Is it a matter of meditating before you do a vocal take?

There are definitely tears, that’s for sure. Times when I needed to cry a little bit, because I was reaching a brick wall of, Why can’t I get to this place that I feel is out there? The meditative state was also in my singing—not words, just messing with different sounds, exploring my voice, exploring my body.

I still play some of the first songs I ever wrote. When I was rehearsing songs from The Navigator with my band recently, I listened to that album for the first time since I put it out. And I felt a lot of love for that time of my life. It’s more about the experiences of touring, and press, that were hard. Especially for Small Town Heroes. When I was recording it, I had already made a bunch of records with Andrea at Bomb Shelter in Nashville, and it felt like the same thing: “I’m just making music with my friends.” But then when it came out and I was on the road and doing press, I started feeling like, “I really don’t want to fuck this up. I don’t want to play on the street anymore.” It felt so life or death. And now I can hear those songs and play them and be a little less worried about survival.

To be coming from New Orleans, where a lot of musicians are so talented and don’t get a lot of national coverage—it felt like a major responsibility. I was out on the road for a long time, and I just really wanted to do good. I wanted to make a banging show. I was on a path where I felt like I couldn’t keep up. I felt really burned out. And I guess that’s about when stage fright started happening, which I never had before.

I don’t in the same way I did. If you asked me a year ago, I would have been like, “I’m fucking terrified.” But I’m trying to shift my perspective of what my job really is. And I’m learning more and more that it’s not to strive for some kind of perfection. It’s about being present, and connecting with people, and connecting with my band. Now that I have that as my goal, I know I can do that.

Life on Earth is about as sweeping as a title could possibly be, and the themes you’re talking about—nature, heartbreak, the tragedy of an ICE detainment center—are pretty divergent on the surface. Do you see the title as a gesture at the way they are all connected?

I was thinking a lot about survival and adaptation, ideas that came from reading this book Emergent Strategy, by adrienne maree brown. Living in New Orleans with the hurricanes, you’re always on: “Here we go, it’s that time of year when we all might lose everything.” After the last four years politically, where I was so reactive, going into this record I was trying to be about, “Instead of what I’m against, what am I for?” And shit is gonna be crazy no matter who is in the fuckin’ White House, which I already knew. So I just wanted to get into survival. How do we survive, and how do we adapt on this planet, at this time? It led me to a lot of different places, both macro and micro.

I love to get a title and have it take me where I need to go. It will come early, when I have one song, maybe two, and then it will inform a bunch of the songs. That’s what happened with The Navigator, too. I got the title, and I was like, “What does that mean? How can I get there?”

Do you think that living in New Orleans makes the question of climate change more urgent to you than it might be to someone in, say, New York City?

Well, people in New York City can’t ignore it either. It really blew my mind to see the subways fucked up and flooded last summer. As a New York City kid, you’re taught that the subway, these systems, are an act of God, or nature. It’s like, “You can’t beat the subway!” That was a very nervous thing to witness for me, watching those systems fail.

But of course, New Orleans is ground zero for climate change. After Hurricane Ida, the city almost lost power for a month. And just to watch the different ways that it affects people, because of how much money they have. To watch the city run out of gas? Talk about embodiment—you feel like an animal that needs to survive. I am definitely experiencing it in my body.

I actually had to heal my relationship to even stuff like rain. For the last couple of years, I would get nervous when storm season would come, and the city would flood really easily. I was like, I hate that I hate the rain. Even in the hardest times, I want to have a more loving relationship with something like rain. Rain isn’t the enemy, actually!

That’s faking it til you make it. I do a lot of that. Lyrics where I’m like, “I’d love to get there.”