Waxahatchee with Special Guests MJ Lenderman & the Wind at Beak & Skiff (Lafayette, NY)
DSP Shows Presents:
Waxahatchee
w/ special guests MJ Lenderman & the Wind, Hurray for the Riff Raff
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards | Lafayette, NY
Waxahatchee
waxahatchee.com
One of the hardest working singer-songwriters in the game is named Katie Crutchfield. She was born in Alabama, grew up near Waxahatchee Creek. Skipped town and struck out on her own as Waxahatchee. That was over a decade ago. Crutchfield says she never knew the road would lead her here, but after six critically acclaimed albums, she’s never felt more confident in herself as an artist. While her sound has evolved from lo-fi folk to lush alt-tinged country, her voice has always remained the same. Honest and close, poetic with Southern lilting. Much like Carson McCullers’s Mick Kelly, determined in her desires and convictions, ready to tell whoever will listen.
And after years of being sober and stable in Kansas City–after years of sacrificing herself to her work and the road–Crutchfield has arrived at her most potent songwriting yet. On her new album, Tigers Blood, Crutchfield emerges as a powerhouse–an ethnologist of the self–forever dedicated to revisiting her wins and losses. But now she’s arriving at revelations and she ain’t holding them back.
Crutchfield says that she wrote most of the songs on ‘Tigers Blood’ during a “hot hand spell,” while on tour in the end of 2022. And when it came time to record, Crutchfield returned to her trusted producer Brad Cook, who brought her sound to a groundbreaking turning point on 2020’s Saint Cloud.
They hunkered down at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas–a border town known for cotton and pecans–and searched for another turn, waited for a sign. Initially, MJ Lenderman, Southern indie-rock wunderkind (much like Crutchfield when she started out) came to play electric guitar and sing on “Right Back To It.” But as soon as they tracked it, Cook told Lenderman he had to stay for the rest of the album. And he did.
“Right Back To It” is ‘Tigers Blood’’s lead single. A nod to country duets like Gram and Emmylou, winding over a steadfast banjo from Phil Cook. Together, Crutchfield and Lenderman harmonize on the chorus: “I’ve been yours for so long/We come right back to it/I let my mind run wild/Don’t know why I do it/But you just settle in/Like a song with no end.” Crutchfield says it’s the first real love song she’s ever written.
The song “Bored” opens with blase drum beats from Spencer Tweedy that crash under Crutchfield as she throws her voice high: “I can get along/ My spine’s a rotted two by four/Barely hanging on/My benevolence just hits the floor.” Lenderman’s scuzzy riffs and Nick Bockrath’s climbing pedal steel add power to the album’s most ‘Southern Rock’ a la Drive-By Truckers moment.
“365” is a story of recognition told from a hard-won place of self-acceptance/forgiveness. Crutchfield initially started writing it for Wynonna Judd, with whom she has written and performed in the past, until the lyrics started hitting closer and closer to home. The writer Annie Ernaux says, “writing is to fight forgetting.” Like Lucinda Williams, Crutchfield’s lyrics are memoir. Throughout ‘Tigers Blood’ Crutchfield is addressing a “you,” but the ‘you’ in “365” evokes raw closeness, vulnerability. “Ya ain’t had much luck but grace is/In the eye of the beholder/And I had my own ideas but/I carried you on my shoulders, anyways.” ��“365” is essentially ‘Tigers Blood’’s aria about addiction, with little to no accompaniment to Crutchfield’s voice. Her backing band is hushed, as if the spotlight’s coming down on her, alone on the stage, giving her testimony. Crutchfield slings her voice with arresting precision, reaching its highest harmony on the whole album. “So when you K*ll, I K*ll/And when you ache, I ache/And we both haunt this old lifeless town/And when you fail, I fail/ When you fly, I fly/And it’s a long way to come back down.”
“365” circles back to the beginning of ‘Tigers Blood,’ where Crutchfield’s words ring clear as a bell. Album opener “3 Sisters” starts with Crutchfield singing over hymn-like piano chords: “I pick you up inside a hopeless prayer/I see you beholden to nothing/I make a living crying it ain’t fair/And not budging.” ‘Tigers Blood’ is Crutchfield at her most confident and resilient. Staring straight at the truth, forgiving but not forgetting, not batting an eye. �
— Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
-----
MJ Lenderman & the Wind
mjlenderman.com
No one paid too much attention when Jake Lenderman recorded Boat Songs, his third album released under his initials, MJ Lenderman. Before he cut it, after all, he was a 20-year-old guitarist working at an ice cream shop in his mountain hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, getting away for self-booked tours of his own songs or with the band he’d recently joined, Wednesday, whenever possible.
But as the pandemic took hold just as he turned 21, Lenderman—then making more money through state unemployment than he had ever serving scoops—enjoyed the sudden luxury of free time. Every day, he would read, paint, and write; every night, he and his roommates, bandmates, and best friends would drink and jam in their catawampus rental home, singing whatever came to mind over their collective racket. Some of those lines stuck around the next morning, slowly becoming 2021’s self-made Ghost of Your Guitar Solo and then 2022’s Boat Songs, recorded in a proper studio for a grand. With its barbed little jokes, canny sports references, and gloriously ragged guitar solos, Boat Songs became one of that year’s biggest breakthroughs, a ramshackle set of charms and chuckles. Much the same happened for Wednesday. Suddenly, people were paying a lot of attention to what Jake Lenderman might make next.
The answer is Manning Fireworks, recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun during multiple four-day stints whenever Lenderman had a break from the road. Coproducing it with pal and frequent collaborator Alex Farrar, Lenderman plays nearly every instrument here. It is not only his fourth full-length and studio debut for ANTI- but also a remarkable development in his story as an incredibly incisive singer-songwriter, whose propensity for humor always points to some uneasy, disorienting darkness. He wrote and made it with full awareness of the gaze Boat Songs had generated, how people now expected something great. Rather than wither, however, Lenderman used that pressure to ask himself what kind of musician he wanted to be—the funny cynic in the corner forever ready with a riposte or barbed bon mot, or one who could sort through his sea of cultural jetsam and one-liners to say something real about himself and his world, to figure out how he fits into all this mess?
He chose, of course, the latter. As a result, Manning Fireworks is an instant classic of an LP, his frank introspection and observation finding the intersection of wit and sadness and taking up residence there for 39 minutes. Yes, the punchlines are still here, as are the rusted-wire guitar solos that have made Lenderman a favorite for indie rock fans looking for an emerging guitar hero. (Speaking of solos, did you hear him leading his totally righteous band, the Wind, on his lauded live cassette last year? Wow.) But there’s a new sincerity, too, as Lenderman lets listeners clearly see the world through his warped lens, perhaps for the first time. “Please don’t laugh,” he deadpans during “Joker Lips,” a magnetic song about feeling pushed out by everyone else. “Only half of what I said was a joke.” Maybe you hear a tremble in his voice? That’s the frown behind the mask, finally slipping from Lenderman’s face.
Perhaps it’s a good moment, then, to tell you more about Lenderman, as a person. Though he is in fact a basketball zealot from North Carolina (and a former two guard who once dropped 10 threes in a game), MJ is not a reference to Michael Jordan. His name is actually Mark Jacob Lenderman. His parents are heads who were going to Bonnaroo when he was a baby and, as he admits, know more about modern music than he does. The second-to-youngest in a family of six, he was a childhood altar boy who went to Catholic school until he begged to go to public school to join the music program. Guitar Hero changed his life, leading him to obsessions with Jimi Hendrix and The Smashing Pumpkins. He began recording himself on his mom’s laptop in fifth grade after discovering My Morning Jacket’s roughshod early works, those lo-fi transmissions serving as some DIY semaphore. The lyrics started to come when he was a teenager.
Those lyrics finally come into sharp focus on Manning Fireworks, where the poetic clarity of William Carlos Williams and the economy of Raymond Carver meet the striking imagery of Harry Crews. Simply witness the opening title track, where an arresting first glimpse of a bird succumbing to a windstorm yields to criticisms of performative religious virtue, crass opportunism, and people who get just plain mean. Or there’s the way, during “Rudolph,” Lenderman uses an imagined scene of Lightning McQueen (yes, the smiling speedy from Cars) mowing down a doe to wonder, flatly, “How many roads must a man walk down ’til he learns he’s just a jerk?”
During the instantly addictive “Wristwatch,” it’s hard to tell if that jerk is Lenderman or someone else that’s too proud of what they have to be humble about what they’ve forsaken. Indeed, there is self-doubt, world weariness, worry, and alcoholism here, conditions rendered with a clarity and care that make these songs feel like short films. None of this is esoteric or obscure, either; Lenderman simply offers everyday anxieties and enthusiasms in uncanny ways.
If that all reads heavy, it actually sounds quite light on Manning Fireworks, sadness and shame routed through guitars that echo the sparkle of R.E.M. and the insistence of Drive-By Truckers, both fellow Southern greats. A half-sneering portrait of a dad cheating his way through a midlife crisis, at least until he gets caught and blasts Clapton in a rented Ferrari en route to Vegas, “She’s Leaving You” is the perfect shout-along anthem for any kid who’s ever felt shortchanged by their parents. The great “On My Knees” suggests a more efficient Crazy Horse, Lenderman’s voice cracking over sawtooth electric guitar as he wonders what it means to have fun in a world where so many people seem so full of shit. Even “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In”—a bummer acoustic blues bouncing first over a drum machine and then a brushed snare, with Lenderman’s voice traced by Karly Hartzman—feels happy to be here, sorting through these existential questions we’re lucky enough to have. There is an abiding sadness to Manning Fireworks, but it feels friendly and familiar, the kind of troubles you’ve always known.
No, no one paid too much attention to Lenderman when he was recording Boat Songs. And for a while there, the amount of attention he was getting as he made Manning Fireworks got in his head. But on the finale, “Bark at the Moon,” he is back in his childhood bedroom in a sleepy mountain tourist town, swearing off big cities or changing himself to suit anyone’s expectations. Instead, he’s playing Guitar Hero until the wee hours, a kid falling in love with rock music all over again. He lets out a playful howl, like the beast in that Ozzy hit. He and his friends then disappear for the next seven minutes, his guitar solo subsumed in a roaring drone that recalls the righteous Sonic Youth records that Lenderman loves, the ones made soon after he was born. It’s a joyous escape and an important moment. Lenderman is still sorting through the kinds of songs he wants to write and remembering they can go anywhere he wants—much like they did back at those late-night house jams, no matter who is now looking.
-----
Hurray for the Riff Raff
hurrayfortheriffraff.com
Alynda Segarra is 36, or a little less than halfway through the average American lifespan. In that comparatively brief time, though, the Hurray for the Riff Raff founder has been something of a modern Huck Finn, an itinerant traveler whose adventures prompt art that reminds us there are always other ways to live.
Born in the Bronx and of Puerto Rican heritage, Segarra was raised there by a blue-collar aunt and uncle, as their father navigated Vietnam trauma and their mother neglected them to work for the likes of Rudy Giuliani. They were radicalized before they were a teenager, baptized in the anti-war movement and galvanized in New York’s punk haunts and queer spaces. At 17, Segarra split, becoming the kid in a communal squat before shuttling to California, where they began crisscrossing the country by hopping trains. They eventually found home—spiritual, emotional, physical—in New Orleans, forming a hobo band and realizing that music was not only a way to share what they’d learned and seen but to learn and see more. Hurray for the Riff Raff steadily rose from house shows to a major label, where Segarra became a pan-everything fixture of the modern folk movement. But that yoke became a burden, prompting Segarra to make the probing and poignant electronic opus, 2022’s Life on Earth, their Nonesuch debut. Catch your breath, OK? We’re back to 36, back to now.
During the last dozen years, these manifold tales of Segarra’s voyages have shaped an oral folklore of sorts, with the teenage vagabonding or subsequent trainhopping becoming what some may hear about Hurray for the Riff Raff before hearing the music itself. Segarra has dropped tidbits in songs, too, but they always worried that their experiences were too radical, that memories of dumpster diving or riding through New Orleans with a dildo dangling on an antenna were too much. But on The Past Is Still Alive, Segarra finally tells the story themselves, speckling stirring reflections on love, loss, and the end or evolution of the United States with foundational scenes from their own life. “It felt like a trust fall, or a letting go of this idea of proving something to the music industry—how I can be more digestible, modifiable, sellable,” Segarra says. “I feel like I’m closer to what I actually have to share.”
There is, for instance, sex and communal musicmaking on an island of San Francisco trash during “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive),” a charged attempt to reckon the erosion of our childhood innocence with a belief that a worthwhile future is still possible. Or there are the cops and the trains and the long walks down empty Nebraska highways to escape said cops during “Ogalla,” the cathartic closer that tries to maintain the spirit of the past while actually surviving in the now. The Past Is Still Alive is the record of Segarra’s life so far, not only because it chronicles the past to understand the present but also because it is the most singular and magnetic thing Hurray for the Riff Raff have yet made. A master work of modern folk-rock, The Past Is Still Alive resets the terms of that tired term.
Get Tickets
Waxahatchee
w/ special guests MJ Lenderman & the Wind, Hurray for the Riff Raff
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards | Lafayette, NY
Waxahatchee
waxahatchee.com
One of the hardest working singer-songwriters in the game is named Katie Crutchfield. She was born in Alabama, grew up near Waxahatchee Creek. Skipped town and struck out on her own as Waxahatchee. That was over a decade ago. Crutchfield says she never knew the road would lead her here, but after six critically acclaimed albums, she’s never felt more confident in herself as an artist. While her sound has evolved from lo-fi folk to lush alt-tinged country, her voice has always remained the same. Honest and close, poetic with Southern lilting. Much like Carson McCullers’s Mick Kelly, determined in her desires and convictions, ready to tell whoever will listen.
And after years of being sober and stable in Kansas City–after years of sacrificing herself to her work and the road–Crutchfield has arrived at her most potent songwriting yet. On her new album, Tigers Blood, Crutchfield emerges as a powerhouse–an ethnologist of the self–forever dedicated to revisiting her wins and losses. But now she’s arriving at revelations and she ain’t holding them back.
Crutchfield says that she wrote most of the songs on ‘Tigers Blood’ during a “hot hand spell,” while on tour in the end of 2022. And when it came time to record, Crutchfield returned to her trusted producer Brad Cook, who brought her sound to a groundbreaking turning point on 2020’s Saint Cloud.
They hunkered down at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas–a border town known for cotton and pecans–and searched for another turn, waited for a sign. Initially, MJ Lenderman, Southern indie-rock wunderkind (much like Crutchfield when she started out) came to play electric guitar and sing on “Right Back To It.” But as soon as they tracked it, Cook told Lenderman he had to stay for the rest of the album. And he did.
“Right Back To It” is ‘Tigers Blood’’s lead single. A nod to country duets like Gram and Emmylou, winding over a steadfast banjo from Phil Cook. Together, Crutchfield and Lenderman harmonize on the chorus: “I’ve been yours for so long/We come right back to it/I let my mind run wild/Don’t know why I do it/But you just settle in/Like a song with no end.” Crutchfield says it’s the first real love song she’s ever written.
The song “Bored” opens with blase drum beats from Spencer Tweedy that crash under Crutchfield as she throws her voice high: “I can get along/ My spine’s a rotted two by four/Barely hanging on/My benevolence just hits the floor.” Lenderman’s scuzzy riffs and Nick Bockrath’s climbing pedal steel add power to the album’s most ‘Southern Rock’ a la Drive-By Truckers moment.
“365” is a story of recognition told from a hard-won place of self-acceptance/forgiveness. Crutchfield initially started writing it for Wynonna Judd, with whom she has written and performed in the past, until the lyrics started hitting closer and closer to home. The writer Annie Ernaux says, “writing is to fight forgetting.” Like Lucinda Williams, Crutchfield’s lyrics are memoir. Throughout ‘Tigers Blood’ Crutchfield is addressing a “you,” but the ‘you’ in “365” evokes raw closeness, vulnerability. “Ya ain’t had much luck but grace is/In the eye of the beholder/And I had my own ideas but/I carried you on my shoulders, anyways.” ��“365” is essentially ‘Tigers Blood’’s aria about addiction, with little to no accompaniment to Crutchfield’s voice. Her backing band is hushed, as if the spotlight’s coming down on her, alone on the stage, giving her testimony. Crutchfield slings her voice with arresting precision, reaching its highest harmony on the whole album. “So when you K*ll, I K*ll/And when you ache, I ache/And we both haunt this old lifeless town/And when you fail, I fail/ When you fly, I fly/And it’s a long way to come back down.”
“365” circles back to the beginning of ‘Tigers Blood,’ where Crutchfield’s words ring clear as a bell. Album opener “3 Sisters” starts with Crutchfield singing over hymn-like piano chords: “I pick you up inside a hopeless prayer/I see you beholden to nothing/I make a living crying it ain’t fair/And not budging.” ‘Tigers Blood’ is Crutchfield at her most confident and resilient. Staring straight at the truth, forgiving but not forgetting, not batting an eye. �
— Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
-----
MJ Lenderman & the Wind
mjlenderman.com
No one paid too much attention when Jake Lenderman recorded Boat Songs, his third album released under his initials, MJ Lenderman. Before he cut it, after all, he was a 20-year-old guitarist working at an ice cream shop in his mountain hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, getting away for self-booked tours of his own songs or with the band he’d recently joined, Wednesday, whenever possible.
But as the pandemic took hold just as he turned 21, Lenderman—then making more money through state unemployment than he had ever serving scoops—enjoyed the sudden luxury of free time. Every day, he would read, paint, and write; every night, he and his roommates, bandmates, and best friends would drink and jam in their catawampus rental home, singing whatever came to mind over their collective racket. Some of those lines stuck around the next morning, slowly becoming 2021’s self-made Ghost of Your Guitar Solo and then 2022’s Boat Songs, recorded in a proper studio for a grand. With its barbed little jokes, canny sports references, and gloriously ragged guitar solos, Boat Songs became one of that year’s biggest breakthroughs, a ramshackle set of charms and chuckles. Much the same happened for Wednesday. Suddenly, people were paying a lot of attention to what Jake Lenderman might make next.
The answer is Manning Fireworks, recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun during multiple four-day stints whenever Lenderman had a break from the road. Coproducing it with pal and frequent collaborator Alex Farrar, Lenderman plays nearly every instrument here. It is not only his fourth full-length and studio debut for ANTI- but also a remarkable development in his story as an incredibly incisive singer-songwriter, whose propensity for humor always points to some uneasy, disorienting darkness. He wrote and made it with full awareness of the gaze Boat Songs had generated, how people now expected something great. Rather than wither, however, Lenderman used that pressure to ask himself what kind of musician he wanted to be—the funny cynic in the corner forever ready with a riposte or barbed bon mot, or one who could sort through his sea of cultural jetsam and one-liners to say something real about himself and his world, to figure out how he fits into all this mess?
He chose, of course, the latter. As a result, Manning Fireworks is an instant classic of an LP, his frank introspection and observation finding the intersection of wit and sadness and taking up residence there for 39 minutes. Yes, the punchlines are still here, as are the rusted-wire guitar solos that have made Lenderman a favorite for indie rock fans looking for an emerging guitar hero. (Speaking of solos, did you hear him leading his totally righteous band, the Wind, on his lauded live cassette last year? Wow.) But there’s a new sincerity, too, as Lenderman lets listeners clearly see the world through his warped lens, perhaps for the first time. “Please don’t laugh,” he deadpans during “Joker Lips,” a magnetic song about feeling pushed out by everyone else. “Only half of what I said was a joke.” Maybe you hear a tremble in his voice? That’s the frown behind the mask, finally slipping from Lenderman’s face.
Perhaps it’s a good moment, then, to tell you more about Lenderman, as a person. Though he is in fact a basketball zealot from North Carolina (and a former two guard who once dropped 10 threes in a game), MJ is not a reference to Michael Jordan. His name is actually Mark Jacob Lenderman. His parents are heads who were going to Bonnaroo when he was a baby and, as he admits, know more about modern music than he does. The second-to-youngest in a family of six, he was a childhood altar boy who went to Catholic school until he begged to go to public school to join the music program. Guitar Hero changed his life, leading him to obsessions with Jimi Hendrix and The Smashing Pumpkins. He began recording himself on his mom’s laptop in fifth grade after discovering My Morning Jacket’s roughshod early works, those lo-fi transmissions serving as some DIY semaphore. The lyrics started to come when he was a teenager.
Those lyrics finally come into sharp focus on Manning Fireworks, where the poetic clarity of William Carlos Williams and the economy of Raymond Carver meet the striking imagery of Harry Crews. Simply witness the opening title track, where an arresting first glimpse of a bird succumbing to a windstorm yields to criticisms of performative religious virtue, crass opportunism, and people who get just plain mean. Or there’s the way, during “Rudolph,” Lenderman uses an imagined scene of Lightning McQueen (yes, the smiling speedy from Cars) mowing down a doe to wonder, flatly, “How many roads must a man walk down ’til he learns he’s just a jerk?”
During the instantly addictive “Wristwatch,” it’s hard to tell if that jerk is Lenderman or someone else that’s too proud of what they have to be humble about what they’ve forsaken. Indeed, there is self-doubt, world weariness, worry, and alcoholism here, conditions rendered with a clarity and care that make these songs feel like short films. None of this is esoteric or obscure, either; Lenderman simply offers everyday anxieties and enthusiasms in uncanny ways.
If that all reads heavy, it actually sounds quite light on Manning Fireworks, sadness and shame routed through guitars that echo the sparkle of R.E.M. and the insistence of Drive-By Truckers, both fellow Southern greats. A half-sneering portrait of a dad cheating his way through a midlife crisis, at least until he gets caught and blasts Clapton in a rented Ferrari en route to Vegas, “She’s Leaving You” is the perfect shout-along anthem for any kid who’s ever felt shortchanged by their parents. The great “On My Knees” suggests a more efficient Crazy Horse, Lenderman’s voice cracking over sawtooth electric guitar as he wonders what it means to have fun in a world where so many people seem so full of shit. Even “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In”—a bummer acoustic blues bouncing first over a drum machine and then a brushed snare, with Lenderman’s voice traced by Karly Hartzman—feels happy to be here, sorting through these existential questions we’re lucky enough to have. There is an abiding sadness to Manning Fireworks, but it feels friendly and familiar, the kind of troubles you’ve always known.
No, no one paid too much attention to Lenderman when he was recording Boat Songs. And for a while there, the amount of attention he was getting as he made Manning Fireworks got in his head. But on the finale, “Bark at the Moon,” he is back in his childhood bedroom in a sleepy mountain tourist town, swearing off big cities or changing himself to suit anyone’s expectations. Instead, he’s playing Guitar Hero until the wee hours, a kid falling in love with rock music all over again. He lets out a playful howl, like the beast in that Ozzy hit. He and his friends then disappear for the next seven minutes, his guitar solo subsumed in a roaring drone that recalls the righteous Sonic Youth records that Lenderman loves, the ones made soon after he was born. It’s a joyous escape and an important moment. Lenderman is still sorting through the kinds of songs he wants to write and remembering they can go anywhere he wants—much like they did back at those late-night house jams, no matter who is now looking.
-----
Hurray for the Riff Raff
hurrayfortheriffraff.com
Alynda Segarra is 36, or a little less than halfway through the average American lifespan. In that comparatively brief time, though, the Hurray for the Riff Raff founder has been something of a modern Huck Finn, an itinerant traveler whose adventures prompt art that reminds us there are always other ways to live.
Born in the Bronx and of Puerto Rican heritage, Segarra was raised there by a blue-collar aunt and uncle, as their father navigated Vietnam trauma and their mother neglected them to work for the likes of Rudy Giuliani. They were radicalized before they were a teenager, baptized in the anti-war movement and galvanized in New York’s punk haunts and queer spaces. At 17, Segarra split, becoming the kid in a communal squat before shuttling to California, where they began crisscrossing the country by hopping trains. They eventually found home—spiritual, emotional, physical—in New Orleans, forming a hobo band and realizing that music was not only a way to share what they’d learned and seen but to learn and see more. Hurray for the Riff Raff steadily rose from house shows to a major label, where Segarra became a pan-everything fixture of the modern folk movement. But that yoke became a burden, prompting Segarra to make the probing and poignant electronic opus, 2022’s Life on Earth, their Nonesuch debut. Catch your breath, OK? We’re back to 36, back to now.
During the last dozen years, these manifold tales of Segarra’s voyages have shaped an oral folklore of sorts, with the teenage vagabonding or subsequent trainhopping becoming what some may hear about Hurray for the Riff Raff before hearing the music itself. Segarra has dropped tidbits in songs, too, but they always worried that their experiences were too radical, that memories of dumpster diving or riding through New Orleans with a dildo dangling on an antenna were too much. But on The Past Is Still Alive, Segarra finally tells the story themselves, speckling stirring reflections on love, loss, and the end or evolution of the United States with foundational scenes from their own life. “It felt like a trust fall, or a letting go of this idea of proving something to the music industry—how I can be more digestible, modifiable, sellable,” Segarra says. “I feel like I’m closer to what I actually have to share.”
There is, for instance, sex and communal musicmaking on an island of San Francisco trash during “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive),” a charged attempt to reckon the erosion of our childhood innocence with a belief that a worthwhile future is still possible. Or there are the cops and the trains and the long walks down empty Nebraska highways to escape said cops during “Ogalla,” the cathartic closer that tries to maintain the spirit of the past while actually surviving in the now. The Past Is Still Alive is the record of Segarra’s life so far, not only because it chronicles the past to understand the present but also because it is the most singular and magnetic thing Hurray for the Riff Raff have yet made. A master work of modern folk-rock, The Past Is Still Alive resets the terms of that tired term.
Get Tickets