They Rode the Rails, Made Friends, and Fell Out of Love With America

The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ultimately capture the hope that a better life is at the end of a long drive.

One of the best new albums of this year joins that tradition but also diverges from it, right down to the mode of transportation that it focuses on. At age 17, the singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra left their home in the Bronx and started hitching rides on freight trains. They eventually settled in New Orleans and rose to become one of the most prominent voices of the Americana scene, recording under the name Hurray for the Riff Raff. Now, on their ninth album, The Past Is Still Alive, the 36-year-old Segarra revisits memories of their youth to draw a subversive—and heartbreaking—map of the nation.

Segarra’s voice has soft edges but a hard center, befitting songs in which outrage and pain simmer beneath the pastoral. They’re best known for the 2017 album The Navigator, an operatic story cycle inspired by Segarra’s Nuyorican heritage. More recently, 2022’s Life on Earth was marketed as a work of “nature punk,” mourning climate change in new-wave anthems. The Past Is Still Alive is not quite so conceptual as those releases, but it offers a reminder that memoir—theoretically an individualistic exercise—can convey a panoramic sense of places and peoples.

The songs collage together scenes and observations amid country-rock arrangements that glimmer with reverb and feature loose, lassoing guitar solos. Segarra mentions New York City streets, Florida swamps, and southwestern pueblos, and colors them with sense memories: a childhood image of “feeding grapefruits to the cows,” a dive-bar recollection of “kissing in the dark, you know the feeling.” Characters emerge in similarly evocative sketches. Traveling as a teen, Segarra fell in with a “barrel of freaks” for whom wandering was survival: “I’m so happy that we escaped from where we came,” Segarra sings.

The mood of these songs is mystical and searching, but with an undercurrent of grief. We meet a friend called Miss Jonathan, who has holes in her fishnet tights; she gets beaten in the street and is never seen again. On “Snake Plant,” Segarra addresses the fentanyl crisis: “Most of our old friends are dead,” they sing, adding, “There’s a war on the people / What don’t you understand?” “Hourglass” chronicles Segarra’s discomfort at some gathering of yuppie types. “I always feel like a dirty kid,” goes one line. “I used to eat out of the garbage.”

[Read: The band that’s been charting America’s burnout for decades]

As those lyrics suggest, Segarra is making a class critique about the way that our society grinds down on the vulnerable. But the message is mostly conveyed lightly, woven through interpersonal stories. On the extraordinary opener, “Alibi,” Segarra negotiates with a friend who seems bent on self-destruction. The lyrics are shaped by addiction recovery and suicide-prevention best practices—urging the friend to just take it day by day—but the language is casual and warm. “Play another hand,” Segarra suggests to the friend. “Maybe we’ll start a band.”

Where did the rails take Segarra in the end? Self-actualization, achievement, liberation? Nothing so triumphant, at least according to what’s on the album. For all the wonder Segarra conveys, this is a story about radical disenchantment: “Say goodbye to America / I wanna see it dissolve,” they sing, in a tone of trembling determination, on “Colossus of Roads.” After nine gentle, unimposing tracks, the music crescendos noisily on the final proper song, “Ogallala.” Segarra sings of watching the world burn, and then they sing of waiting around in a garden—settled, at peace, in some new land.