Hurray for the Riff Raff front person Alynda Segarra is not the first musician to speak out against war, nor are they the first to sing about violence against queer people, or about the ways that addiction has ravaged their community. They credit their antiwar ancestors—people like Saul Williams—whenever given the chance, and nod to contemporary activist artists Kara Jackson and Sen Morimoto as inspirations. And in their new album The Past Is Still Alive, out today, Segarra continues their work, singing about grief in the multitude of forms it can take.
Approximately a year ago, just after Segarra completed the songs that make up The Past Is Still Alive, their father died. He was a Latin jazz musician as well as a music teacher, and played an important role in developing and encouraging Segarra’s own relationship with music. He also served in Vietnam and spoke candidly with them about the issue of addiction. “So, I think he pops up a lot in the record,” Segarra says.
Soulful and folksy, their new record functions as a kind of queer Americana ode to the colorful cast of characters Segarra has encountered over the years. Their personal story reads like something from another era: Born and raised in the Bronx in the 1980s and ’90s, they found community in and were invigorated by the politics of the queer and punk scenes in Lower Manhattan, regularly patronizing arts organization ABC No Rio and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. They would go on to spend their teenage years as a runaway, hitchhiking and hopping freight trains with fellow young people before settling in New Orleans.
Such a transitory existence has made Segarra really good at sleeping in cars, but also meant that they’ve seen a lot of things, including their friends’ struggles with substance abuse. In “Snake Plant,” one of the songs released in advance of The Past Is Still Alive, they sing, “Most of our old friends are dead, so test your drugs remember Narcan.” It felt important to them to write plainly about a subject that touches so many people, and yet is still so stigmatized. And they’re planning to have free Narcan at all of their upcoming shows.
In the lobby bar of the historic Hotel Chelsea, Segarra showed up wearing a Ganni sweater vest over a worn white tee, checkered baggy pants, and motorcycle boots. They sat down with Vogue to discuss their New York upbringing and punk scene indoctrination, the challenges of being a sensitive person creating art, and their personal style evolution.
Vogue: You’re from the Bronx. What is it like to be back in New York?
Alynda Segarra: It’s pretty surreal to be in a place like the Hotel Chelsea, and feels kind of like a dream, like a pinching myself moment, you know? I love coming back home. I think once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker, you know? But, it also feels so strange sometimes, especially with my dad’s passing. I think New York has a lot of ghosts of people I love and memories, so it definitely feels like a memory box. When I walk through Tompkins Square Park I feel like I can see past lives still happening here. And I think it’s like that for a lot of people.
I love your outfit today. Tell me about your style evolution.
I’m still learning. I think for non-binary people, things can be really confusing. I’m slowly starting to realize what feels good on my body. For a really long time, I felt really confused about clothing and styling and being perceived. I feel like things are changing in fashion too—[there is] stuff that is a little bit more androgynous—and it’s made it more fun. I think I had a breakthrough moment of, like, Oh, this is supposed to be fun for me. I love moments of feeling glamorous, or adding a little romance, but I’ve learned through trial and error that I really need to feel comfortable. I also love collecting punk shirts that people I know or even people on Instagram are making. And I really love pairing that with something that I found for a deal on the RealReal. It feels very Patti Smith, you know?
I’ve read some stories about your young life as a nomad. When did you leave New York and what was that time in your life like?
I left a couple of days after I turned 17. I was really in the punk DIY scene in the Lower East Side. I found this place called ABC No Rio and they had these things called Saturday matinees and they were only five dollars. Every Saturday at 3 o’clock they would have a show, so it was perfect for all ages. I was looking for people that were likeminded—I was looking for my wolf pack, and going there just gave me something to do every Saturday. And I learned a lot about politics. I learned about the world. They had bands that you’d never heard of that were on tour that probably made like 15 dollars from the show, you know? But it gave me something to look forward to and to be a part of. And then I started meeting more kids that were runaways and travelers who were coming from all over the country. I was doing bad in school, I dropped out, I was just, like, really lost, and I felt really called to go out on the road. And so I left and was hitchhiking and riding freight trains and just going deep into, like, I’m leaving society.
And what kind of music were you into? Punk, obviously, but any artists in particular?
Bikini Kill. When I found Bikini Kill, I was just like, Oh, okay. I think I was 14 and I just felt like someone opened this door and was like, You don’t have to go down this road of hoping you’re pretty and hoping you’re skinny and hoping the boy likes you, and all this stuff. It just opened my mind.
What does it feel like to be putting out this new album? And how is it different from your past work?
I think with Life on Earth it had been a while since I put out a record, like five years, and then coming back post-lockdown was so scary. I started to get very nervous about if I could actually handle having a life in music, because it just started to feel like everything was changing so fast and the money was dwindling and just trying to keep up with the internet—I was starting to feel, like Wow, maybe I’m just too sensitive to do this, and that really scared me. And then throughout having that feeling I found these really magical moments of being supported by my friends and then experiencing a big loss with my dad. And I wrote this record very much in this mindset of, what if I were to just write as if it’s just me and my friends in a living room and not put all these pressures on myself? And I also felt that if I’m too sensitive for this job, then I might as well go out being honest and vulnerable because, why not. I started writing because I am sensitive and care about the world.
I wanted to ask specifically about “Snake Plant” and about the lyrics in it that are explicitly about Narcan and addiction. What brought you to write about that?
I think during lockdown a lot of us were woken up to just how much people struggling with addiction were suffering, and how in that isolation we lost a lot of people. I feel like it’s becoming so important to destigmatize Narcan and destigmatize testing strips. People are gonna do drugs no matter what, so we might as well make sure we can save people’s lives. It felt good to just be really plain with the language, and I was reading a lot about the AIDS crisis and ACT UP and Gran Fury—these art groups and activist groups that were working to save the lives of their communities. And it just started to really make me think about what it means when we lose someone. We lose their potential, we lose the possible art they could make, and we lose the people that they touch. So it really made me want to just try to do whatever I could to make it so we don’t lose anybody else.
Do you feel like the overwhelming emotion on the album is grief?
I was actually thinking about this last night, and the thing is that grief is love. And for me that was such a lightbulb moment, because I think I’ve been scared of grief—because it sounds so hard, and it is hard. But also, love is hard. If you really love someone, you’re going to grieve them forever, and it also doesn’t have to be just endless suffering. For me, in this year of grieving, I’ve also had moments of freedom, because the grief freed me from self-consciousness. That’s grief, too—just kind of clearing away the clutter. So I think that, in that way, grief is all over the album. It’s about being present. It’s also about mourning loss, but it’s a lot about love in many different forms.
This interview has been condensed for clarity.