Hurray for the Riff Raff on New Orleans, the Pandemic, and Finding a Vulnerable Balance

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Every record from Alynda Segarra has been even better than the last, and that rule more than applies to their eighth full-length as Hurray For the Riff Raff, this year's The Past Is Still Alive. Alynda is quickly becoming a living institution when it comes to songwriting, and they've been on my list of people to talk to for a minute now—so I was very happy to hop on the phone with them earlier this month for a chat about their incredible year and a host of other topics. Check it out:

Where am I talking to you from today?
I'm in my new home of Chicago. I just moved here a couple of months ago, but I've been on tour since I was born, so it feels like I'm finally settling in.

Had you spent any extended period of time in the city previously?
There's a weird New Orleans-Chicago connection—of course, there's the musical history connection of blues and train lines—but I was coming here a lot in my younger years, and now my whole band is based out of here. I fell into this really cool circle of musicians like Nnamdi and Sen Morimoto.

Yeah, whenever I'm hearing something interesting, there's a high chance it's coming from Chicago. Why do you think that is?
Coming from a city that is also not super industry-focused—New Orleans is not thinking about the music industry—it creates a different type of community and focus when it comes to the work that people make. Chicago is geographically right in the middle of New York and L.A., so it's still in it—it's way more in it than New Orleans is—but we also do our own thing. We don't have to really play by these rules and strive to have some kind of mainstream success—it's just enough that we do our own thing.

Of course, everywhere has gotten way more expensive, but I'm just so grateful to live in a city where I feel like I don't have to fucking hustle as hard, because I can still afford rent here. That really makes a difference. I love living in cities where people are just like, "We might as well do our own thing, because people aren't paying attention to us anyway." It just makes for better art. Yeah, that makes a lot. No offense to New York and L.A., but... [Laughs]

Talk to me more about New Orleans. It's a fairly singular place.
I grew up in New York, and I felt like I had to get the fuck out of there because I had a different type of hustle in me. Going to New Orleans opened up so many doors for me. It met me where I was, and there's a feeling of survival that creates a super strong community. I went there with literally fucking nothing—just being like, "I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't live anywhere. I don't have anything going on." I didn't even really play music.

The New Orleans street music scene is so strong, and it was this totally different look into musicianship than I was used to. It was very focused on mastery of your craft and being obsessed with it, and how the music can become a way to live a beautiful, meaningful life. I felt like I found like a way out of the darkness, because there was no focus at all about commercial success. It was all about learning how to play these old songs and focusing on trying to get better at whatever our craft is, because this world is burning around us. What else can we do except try to carve out an artistic life for ourselves? That's seeped into the DNA of New Orleans.

The city gets left behind, too. There's a history of racism—of overlooking and leaving people literally to die. It creates this really strong bond and focus on trying to get through and create something beautiful along the way. I feel so lucky that that's where I ended up, and that it's where I spent decades of my life. It definitely informed the way that I write and look at music, and how I approach my band.

It's also a really hard place to fucking leave. You get used to that life—the beauty of it, and the hardship of it, because life there is so fucking hard, and that's besides climate change, which is a huge looming thing that you deal with living there for so long. It was really difficult for me to even consider living anywhere else—and then Chicago just presented itself as the next chapter of my life. I do feel a little bit relieved to be out of the swamp and more in this outside world. I'm meeting people and making connections, and I'm in a very collaborative place in my life right now, so I'm excited to explore and write with people.

Tell me more about what you've taken away from your years of collaborating and playing with others.
God, I learned so much. I've been learning in public. I started when I was so young—19—and I learned so much about taking on the responsibility and stepping into the role of being like, "Well, this is my music, and this is my band." I came from a place of looking for a family—a crew—and we're all in this together, and of course that's wonderful. But when you're writing all the fucking music and it's all your vision, I've learned how to own that and have it be totally fucking normal. That's the thing about coming from a city and a music scene where people weren't really hired guns—everybody in New Orleans was all-in and super equal. And that's wonderful, but when you're a songwriter and this is your project, it's a different thing. It took me a long time to become comfortable with that and find the middle ground. I'm in a way better place with it now, and I feel really lucky that I'm playing music with other people who also have their own projects.

I've also learned how to be a little bit braver in not believing that I need certain people in order for it to be any good. I had to work on having confidence in and believing myself. I got really attached to certain musicians that I just loved working with, and when people need to eventually live their own lives—maybe they want to go to school, maybe they want to have a kid, maybe they don't want to fucking tour anymore, 'cause tour is so hard—you have to learn how to believe in yourself and your work, and believe that you can keep going and that there's something special about you that will continue to grow and change. I had to grow belief in myself because my band was an extension of me. I don't want to have kids and I don't want to get married, so my band is where I went. As a punk, this is my crew and this is who I want to live my life with and take care of each other. I had to learn how to make it less high-stakes and be like, "It'll be okay." It sounds intense, but it was really like that for me.

Tell me more about what's changed for you in the last five years when it comes to touring.
It's interesting to go even further back. I felt like I was so much more fearless, and I didn't really give a fuck as much. God, if I could just have a dose of that, it would be so great. I was like, "This is what we sound like, we're gonna have fun up here, okay bye." Somewhere along the line, I started developing more anxiety—like, stage fright—and that sucks. The anxiety that comes with this being your life is just so brutal. I'd like to send love to anybody who's reading this and suffers from it, because that's been a battle for me.

I will say, with this record there was a lot of healing that happened for me when it comes to my stage fright and anxiety. That was really wonderful—but it still is a thing. I don't know, touring is just so fucking crazy. When you don't have a huge budget, the budget ensures that you have some sort of touchstone that things will be somewhat stable, because these outside factors are somewhat the same as they were last night—and I'm still in a place where it's pretty much like, "Okay, what are we going to deal with tonight?" It gets really hard to focus on the spiritual aspect of
performing.

Something happened with this record—in this time in my life—where I was just accepting the chaos and being like, "I don't know what is going to happen tonight. I know I have a great band and a great front-of-house, and we'll just do what we can." I just tried to approach it more like that, but it's an ongoing project. Touring is crazy, and now I'm like, what the fuck is it going to be like? Touring in Trump's America is rough fucking stuff. So we'll see. We're going to be out there and playing to people who probably really need to hear music and be together.

What are your coping mechanisms when it comes to being on the road? I'm a big hippie when it comes to tinctures and herbal shit to keep my immune system up. As I've gotten more into this life, I'm definitely just trying to stay as healthy as I can on tour, and with eating as well. I'm so annoying when it comes to food, but I also accept that I'm touring with people that don't find it annoying—who are like, "Yeah, we don't want to get sick or eat like shit either." So it's about taking that and exercise seriously, and doing these really basic things and accepting that I'm not a superhero, and that I need to do these things in order to feel grounded and in touch with my body.

I also feel really lucky with the crew that I have right now, because I feel like I can really depend on them if something were to go wrong. That is such a thing—being with the right crew of people who match your anxieties and ways of coping with super stressful situations. It's like a commitment to yourself, and admitting that it's okay to need something. I come from a world of touring that was like, "Throw anything at me and I can fucking do it. We can we can exist on a shoestring. We don't need anything to put on a great show." And now I'm like, "You know what? I need stuff. That's okay."

The latest record is great, and you've had an increasing level of visibility over the last eight or so years when it comes to press coverage. Tell me about how that feels as an artist.
I'm so aware of how lucky I am to get it. I really believe in this work, and this record was so significant to me with the background of how I made it. I do feel like there's been growth with each record, and I want to stay in that mindset. It keeps me searching and hungry for the next project, the next inspiration. I let that part of it fuel me. "Okay, they loved this one, but what's the next one gonna be?" I don't get too wrapped up in caring about what people are saying, necessarily, because you're gonna get your heart broken eventually. But I try to make it so the next one speaks the truth about where I'm at now.

Talk to me about writing about your own experiences, lyrically. Are there moments where you feel like you need to pull back?
When I first started writing songs, I was so brutally honest and vulnerable. I was writing for my best friends and whoever could fit in my living room, so I felt totally okay about being explicit with memory, trauma, or working through shit in front of people. Eventually, that got too hard as I started to actually tour and get signed. I started focusing more on the outside world, society, and beliefs. I wanted to make work that made people feel like they didn't want to fucking give up or die.

With this record, something happened where both impulses met in the middle, and I felt a bit more like I had nothing to lose. I felt like it was time to just talk about the shit I've been through—the people I miss, the heartbreak I'm dealing with—while also blending these perspectives. That's where I'm at now. Sometimes my neuroses can be that I don't want to dwell too much on hard shit. That can block me as an artist. I actually really respect people who are so okay with going deep into the darkness—and, like, this is my fucking record. It's brutal.

I tend towards, not optimism, but, "Okay, what are we going to do with this?" That's where I go when it's been a really difficult time. What am I going to do with it? How am I going to make it into something? How am I going to turn it into something that can fuel me to keep going? Sometimes, that can stop me. I can feel like it's too vulnerable to not tend towards that and just let it sit and be like, "This is just hard, and I don't see a silver lining or a future." That's a bravery that some artists have that I'd really love to tap into.

It's also brave that some artists are like, "I'm not here to pretend to tell you that I know what we should do to make it through life. I don't fucking know." In the past, I've definitely taken on that type of role. I think it's just my trauma response: "Okay, what are we gonna do?" You just do what you can, so I'm definitely proud of the songs that have come from either perspective.

I read an interview with you earlier this year where you mentioned that some of the lyrics for this record came from time in lockdown. I do believe that's a period of time that people are still recovering from. With distance from that time, how do you feel about reflecting on it?
God. I think I feel more and more disturbed and angry with our obsession with "moving forward," and things becoming old news. The pandemic, the millions of people around the world that we lost. It's like all of that has become old news, and the way that we take in information and our own experiences can become so jaded. "Oh, you're talking about the pandemic again. We already did all of our pandemic media content." That really disturbs me, and I feel pretty strongly about continuing to talk about how we're human beings who went through such an intense human experience.

I've been dealing with a lot of disgust with the feeling of, "Ah, we got to keep it moving—that's an old story now." It makes me more want to document people, times, and movements, because I'm just so afraid of things getting erased. Everything moves so fast, and what gets put down in the history books is still up for debate. It became clearer for me in lockdown that I really wanted to document what I'd seen and experienced that has helped me survive to this point and still have a fire in me to keep living. That was my biggest takeaway—I somehow made it out of that that crazy time. How am I gonna document these communities and people that I love, who I've been lucky enough to be around?

I relate to what you're saying pretty heavily. I try to have sympathy for people who do want to forget, because it was really painful and that's the human impulse. Obviously, the powers that be that try to get us to forget, I have much less sympathy for.
Exactly. They find tender, sincere, real experiences and make them corny and like yesterday's news. That's such a powerful tool to turn what actually makes us feel human into something that you can roll your eyes at. That's something that I want to combat—that well-functioning machine.

Meg Duffy contributed to the record too. I'm a big fan of theirs, they were on the newsletter a few years ago. Tell me about what makes working with Meg so special.
What a fucking legend. I specifically asked for Meg to be on this record, and we were able to fly them out for a day. They came in, and it was like lightning struck. You're just sitting there watching them invoke fucking energy that did not exist in this room before they started playing that fucking guitar. It was a really physical, spiritual experience to be in the room with them, and I've been such a fan of Meg's songwriting. I love all the Hand Habits records, and I think they're one of the best living fucking guitarists right now. I really believe that. I feel really lucky that they put their magic on this record, and I definitely plan on calling them in the future for the next one. They're super wise, super humble, and tapping into something that is genreless and is the future. When I was around Meg, I was like, "You're the future of music." I can't wait to see what they do next. Every record is better than the last, and they elevate everything that they are a part of. That's such a special ability.