Dec 27, 2024

Hurray For The Riff Raff: Colossus of a song and my Album of the Year

Updated: Dec 30, 2024

Neil Morton

Hurray For The Riff Raff, the project and band name of New York-raised Alynda Segarra, sounds like a celebration, and it is just that. The Past Is Still Alive was released in February and I had a strong feeling then that it might become my Album of the Year. The beautiful Colossus Of Roads, my final Song Of The Week of 2024, has been a track to turn to whenever empathy and compassion seemed distant goals.

‘I’ve only had this experience a couple of times, where a song falls on me – it’s all there, and I don’t do anything,’ Segarra said. ‘Writing Colossus Of Roads felt like creating a space where all us outsiders can be safe together. That doesn’t exist, but it exists in our minds, and it exists in this song – this one is sacred to me.

‘I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to write that song. It’s about finding romance in the midst of tragedy, in the midst of violence. It’s a song that I wrote for queer people, for outsider communities, right after the Club Q shooting in Colorado.’

Hold my head like a live wire

Duck quick now I hear gunfire

Caught somewhere in the space between

Do you love me and do you love me?

Say goodbye to America

I wanna see it dissolve

I can be your poster boy

For the great American fall

Segarra’s early turbulent years echo those of Allison Russell, the original Outside Child, for harrowing accounts of survival on the street among the misfits of society, the perils of addiction, the goodbyes to lost friends; it is remarkable that we can now enjoy what NPR Music described as ‘an epic tale of life on the road, a nearly mythic version of their own life story that stands alongside other great American musical travelogues’. If a film documented that story, the temptation would be to glamorise rather than reflect its true grit. Either way, you wouldn’t believe it.

In these 11 cinematic songs there is hope, love, sanctuary and defiance. As Paste Magazine wrote: ‘The trauma of the present day is a prelude to the possibilities of a better tomorrow.’ At times Segarra must have doubted the prospect of tomorrow.

Segarra, a non-binary person who prefers to be addressed as they/them, has been performing under the Hurray For The Riff Raff moniker since moving from the Bronx to New Orleans in 2007, hooking up with a hobo band called Dead Man Street Orchestra. That first self-titled album followed a year later but Segarra regards 2022’s Life On Earth as a reset, a new beginning. Its sequel, The Past Is Still Alive, is their ninth studio album.

I know that it’s dangerous

But I wanna see you undress

Wrap you up in the bomb shelter

Of my feather bed

Segarra, who was raised in the Bronx by her aunt and uncle, started recording The Past Is Still Alive shortly after the death of their father, a jazz musician, music teacher and Vietnam veteran, in March 2023. So an album meant to honour those Segarra had lost became even more personal.

As a teenager, it was the politics of the queer and punk scenes in Lower Manhattan that captured their imagination. ‘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 modes of transport were hitch-hiking and freight train-hopping. ‘I look back and think how the fuck did I do that? Because now I’m so neurotic.’

Segarra wanted to go ‘where the weirdos were’. Hello to the riff raff. ‘I met some young train riders when I was hanging out in the Lower East Side and was doing bad in school – I was basically flunking out. I felt like I was really a burden on my aunt and uncle, who were doing their best to raise me. I wanted to figure out what my life purpose was, and I felt this call to join these kids. At that point, I was deep into listening to Woody Guthrie, and it became this obsession of mine to be a train rider.’

On The Past Is Still Alive Segarra reflects on the miles travelled, ‘seeing America through the back roads’, the hardships experienced and the courage gained. The album shimmers with love songs dedicated to real locations and legendary figures such as Sky Red Hawk (Buffalo); the first trans woman Segarra ever met (Hawkmoon); cherished spaces for the vulnerable (Colossus Of Roads); her version of Bob Dylan’s I Was Young When I Left Home (the sinuous Snake Plant); short-lived romances and wisdom learned amid chaos (Vetiver); and the reckoning with addiction that is Alibi (‘You don’t have to die if you don’t want to die’).

As a mouthpiece for the marginalised, no wonder this indie artist of Puerto Rican heritage, perhaps regarded as an alien by a certain past and returning president, received The People’s Voice accolade at this year’s Folk Alliance International awards ceremony. Activist groups such as ACT UP and Gran Fury made a significant impact. The poet Eileen Myles, whose book I Must Be Living Twice is name-checked in Colossus Of Roads, has been a role model along with boxcar artist buZ blurr.

Eileen, I must be living twice

Colossus of roads, buZ blurr in the night

Cowboy hat and a cigarette

Grease marker in my leather vest

Segarra told the LGBTQ+ magazine Them: ‘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 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 confusing someone. I really love this line in Snake Plant: I was born with a baby boy’s soul. And the one in Hawkmoon: I’m becoming the kind of girl that they’ve warned me about.’ Genre and gender fluid.

Segarra, now based in Chicago, told NPR Music about falling in love with New Orleans: ‘The city took me in; other musicians took me in. They saw something in me and said: Hey, I think you should keep writing songs. I loved how people played music on the street. I loved that it was a late-night town. Being a New Yorker, I love going to other cities that are not trying to be like New York.’

Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, Kevin Morby) again produced for Segarra – ‘a lovingly encouraging figure’. Cook added bass and piano and his brother Phil dobro and keyboards to Segarra’s acoustic guitar with Jan Westerlund on percussion. But as with all her story-telling songs, the lyrics, delivered by that honey-rich yet vulnerable vocal, are the star turn. Poetic fragments from the memory’s scrapbook.

Let’s go paint the oil cans

Write our names on a grain of sand

No one will remember us

Like I will remember us

Meet me down in the Castro

We’ll pretend it’s 1985

Before we were a twinkle

In our great-grandfather’s eye

Segarra’s father would be proud. The past is still alive, and a big future beckons.