Hurray for the Riff Raff is here for your grief

A week ago Alynda Segarra's father died, he sent them a package. It was a box of all the music Segarra had sent him for nearly 20 years, ever since they'd left their childhood home in the Bronx to travel the country. Everything they'd recorded, from burned CDs of street bands and jazz they played, to records from Segarra's band of more than a decade, Huray for the Riff Raff, was there.

“He had absolutely every single thing I had given him since, like, 2006, maybe earlier,” Segarra, who uses their/their pronouns, says in a Zoom call from their home in New Orleans. “I guess he was cleaning out his apartment and mailed it to me. And now I'm like, damn, I'm so lucky to have this.”

Segarra was due to enter the studio in less than a month to record Hurray for the next Riff Raff album, The past is still alive, when their father, Jose — a musician and music teacher — died suddenly in the winter of 2023. “I felt so scared. It felt like I was going on a fucking roller coaster,” admits Segara. “[But] I was so grateful to have a project. I felt like it was a gift from my dad.”

As a result, the songs in The past is still alive, out now, took on new meaning for the 36-year-old. Instead of the big pictures that fueled their previous two records, The Navigator and Life on Earth, the album is a laser-focused reflection on personal relationships. What Segarra didn't realize until Jose's death was that it was also a tribute to the many friends they had lost over the years — whether to drugs, tragic accidents, or just plain ignorance.

“I realized that so many of these songs are about saying goodbye and letting go, and also deciding how do I do that?” says Segarra. “So what are you leaving? What are you carrying?'

Huray for the Riff Raff songs have long chronicled the lives of those on the fringes, building alternate narratives around their stories and often mourning those whose stories were cut short. But this time it hits differently. “I've never experienced grief like that,” Segarra admits, “so one thing I've noticed is that it's made me be like, heck, is the rest of my life just going to be a really heavy goodbye?”

The past is still alive he does not lose himself in these grim revelations, even as he looks into the darkest corners of his grief. Segarra's writing has a new urgency, an immediacy enhanced by the upbeat, singsong melodies – a stripped-down return to the band's folk roots. People and places, from the swamps of Florida to the bookstores of San Francisco, come through in a whirlwind of color and energy, even when the action takes place against the backdrop of the apocalypse, as it does in the grand finale “Ogallala.” When they sing in this song's stirring crescendo, “I made it in time to see the world burn,” it's an invocation not of annihilation but of possibility.

However, the most devastating moments operate on a smaller scale. “You don't have to die if you don't want to die,” Segarra pleads on the album's opener, “Alibi,” a song about the moment they realized a childhood friend was addicted to heroin. “It's just like, how do I convince the listener that he deserves to live?” says Segarra. They let the question linger for a moment, their eyes wide with concern. “And also, recognizing that I can't convince someone of this. Or the only person I can convince is myself.”

Like many other songs on the record, “Alibi” is rich with details from Segarra's life — in this case, growing up in New York and attending anti-Iraq war marches. Elsewhere, “Colossus of Roads” is named after a real-life boxcar artist, while “Hawkmoon” stars the outrageous Miss Jonathan, the first transgender woman Segarra has met. “It's my way of trying to create this memorial to her, even though I don't even know where she is,” Segarra says.

The details of Segarra's life are part of the story of Huray for the Riff Raff. Raised by their aunt and uncle after their parents divorced, they left home at age 17, jumping train cars, living on the streets, and eventually found safe harbor in New Orleans. But until now, they haven't felt comfortable delving into their past in song. The pandemic changed that. “I was like, hell, this bullshit could end. My career could be over,” says Segarra.

Liberation Life on Earth, which dealt with issues such as sexual abuse and the border and climate crises, in 2022, and then returning to touring, brought this internal conflict to a tipping point. “It felt very raw,” Segarra says. “And I felt like, well, I had this big, ambitious idea, and now I've run out of big, ambitious ideas. All I have are these feelings and these memories, and this confusion and longing for how to live life.”

Segara began to write The past is still alive while on the road in the summer of 2022 with Bright Eyes, whose frontman Conor Oberst appears on “The World Is Dangerous.” Their frustration with the state of the world was palpable. On “Colossus of Roads,” the singer, lamenting yet another mass shooting — in this case, the one at Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, in November 2022 — argues for the collapse of the American political system.

“With the previous albums, I felt this pressure to be very hopeful and give people hope, and it started to make me really uncomfortable,” Segarra says. “I wanted to break free from that role and say that things will have to fall apart in order to build something new.”

A similar purge was necessary when it came to dealing with Segarra's past self. “Hourglass,” the record's most intense song, reveals many of their insecurities, from high school dropouts to, at times, being homeless. Segarra credits their producer, Brad Cook, with convincing them that it was even worthy of being a song. “I think I was mostly nervous about actually being like that,” Segarra admits. “It's not even that poetic. It's just me, like 'I was eating junk. I'm surrounded by a lot of music school kids and I feel like an alien.”

One of the biggest breakthroughs for Segarra was finally getting comfortable with their own identity. Being queer, being a woman in the music industry, Puerto Rican American but not native Puerto Rican — they never fully felt like they fit in anywhere. Coming out as non-violent before Life on EarthHis release provided a means of reconciliation. Segarra says it still makes them emotional to think about.

“It had a huge impact on me looking back at my younger self and saying, 'Oh yeah, I've always been like that,'” Segarra says. “But then I felt like I had to buckle down and try to look presentable and try to do all these things that felt really foreign to me. And I felt like I kept failing.”

Segarra explores these struggles poignantly on “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive), the incandescent coming-of-age story that forms the album's emotional core. In it, they express the conflicting sense of obligation they felt to their father, wanting to “be good daughter” despite the fact that they were “born with a boy's soul.” Segarra describes Jose as a “hilarious dad,” who taught them to play music as children and had a free spirit. “It's so lucky to have a foreign dad Segarra says.

It wasn't always easy to appreciate the similarities the two shared. Jose, a Marine who served in the Vietnam War, spent decades with undiagnosed PTSD, so Segarra could only visit him when he was growing up. Finally, he sought treatment. “That's when he really took the time to mend our relationship,” Segarra says, including writing them letters after they settled in New Orleans. “And he really started treating me like an equal.”

Now, those letters, along with the box of music Jose sent before his death, are among the artifacts Segara must keep. So are the voice memos they salvaged from him, a handful of which are included as the last word The past is still alive. The roller coaster ride hasn't stopped, but Segarra has learned to appreciate that their grief is also an expression of love.

“It was a really special relationship. And even though it is super fucking hard,” Segarra says, biting each word for emphasis, “it's also like I feel like he's with me and I feel like our love transcends time and space. You know? So I'm trying to learn to be at peace with it.”