Alynda Segarra makes a home in Chicago

Alynda Segarra’s latest album as Hurray for the Riff Raff, last winter’s The Past Is Still Alive, is a folk odyssey in motion, chronicling train hopping and bus trips. Its lyrics name-check just about every corner of the country: San Francisco, Minnesota, Florida, the southwest. “I was young when I left home / I never stopped running,” Segarra sings on the title track, “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive).”

In real life too, Segarra has been on the move: Earlier this year, they left their longtime home base in New Orleans and relocated to Chicago. They’ve switched cities in part to be closer to collaborators, they explain, and in part because Chicago feels like a better personal and musical fit for where they’re headed at the moment. “I just really want to create a nest here,” they say.

Segarra began their travels in the mid-aughts, leaving their home in the Bronx at age 17 to hop trains like their hero Woody Guthrie. The Past Is Still Alive, they say, is a “scrapbook” or “memory box” of that history: “Hiding from the cops / In Ogallala, Nebraska” (“Ogallala”); wearing a “bathing suit on a two-day drive” (“Snake Plant”); a friend with a “dildo waving on her car antenna” (“Hawkmoon”). Recording for the album began in Durham, North Carolina, a month after the death of Segarra’s father.

This is partly because Segarra’s sometime guitarist, Johnny Wilson, is from Chicago. He’s also their longtime tour manager and sound engineer, and he’s worked with many artists here, including multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Nnamdï Ogbonnaya, one of the founders of Sooper Records. In the 2010s, Wilson and Ogbonnaya played together in the punk band Nervous Passenger, and Wilson is now part of Ogbonnaya’s touring group. So when Segarra needed a bassist for a show in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reaching out to Ogbonnaya was a natural move.

“I’d never actually listened to a full [Hurray for the Riff Raff] record,” Ogbonnaya admits. “My introduction to the band came when I was asked to play with them. But they just needed me to fill in for one show. And I was like, yeah, I’ll do that.” 

One gig turned into another and then into a regular role. (“They’re not sick of me yet, so I’ll stick around as long as they want me around!” Ogbonnaya says.) Thanks to Wilson and Ogbonnaya’s connections, Segarra’s band soon filled up with other Chicago musicians, especially from the orbit of Sooper Records. On Hurray for the Riff Raff’s recent tour to Mexico, the lineup included Marcus Drake on drums, Sen Morimoto on keyboards, Kaina on background vocals, and Parker Grogan (now in Sacramento, but formerly a Chicagoan) on guitar.

Because Segarra was traveling with Chicagoans, throughout 2024 the band used Chicago as a place to rest and recover between tour stops. Segarra finally moved here permanently in September. 

Segarra had been living in New Orleans for around 15 years. “I really needed a change,” they say. In New Orleans, they explain, most musicians don’t tour. “You stay in town and you play your gig every day,” they say. “I was feeling like me and New Orleans were growing apart, because I was gone all the time. I was losing touch with the way that that city operates musically.” 

Segarra also considered the benefits of living in a blue state. They came out as nonbinary before the release of Life on Earth, and The Past Is Still Alive is in many ways a tribute to queer community and queer friends. “When I was coming up learning folk music and being a train rider, all of the people that I was friends with who were interested in old fiddle tunes or learning banjo or any of these traditional songs were queer people,” they say. The song “Hawkmoon” memorializes their friend Miss Jonathan, the first trans woman they’d met. “She opened up my eyes / In the holes of her fishnet tights,” Segarra sings. They also remember seeing Miss Jonathan being beaten in the street.

“There’s such a strong queer resistance and history in the south that gets overlooked,” Segarra says. “There’s going to be people all over the country who are very scared and very concerned with what’s happening and with where our country is being led. And we’re going to play in Florida, because there’s people in Florida who really want to go have a show where they feel a bit of calm, or a place where they can go and feel a little bit healed in this really chaotic time.”

As much as southern resistance and southern community inspire Segarra, though, the current political climate has made even a blue city like New Orleans feel precarious. “Louisiana got lucky during COVID, because we had a Democratic governor,” they say. “He was conservative, but he believed in science. But there’s a new governor there now. . . . ”

Segarra admits to feeling bad about jumping ship to come north. “But I don’t know if guilt really does anything for you or anybody,” they say. “What brought me [to Chicago] was knowing that I would have a strong artistic community that I could survive these times with. So that’s really what I thought about in my move.”

That community is already coming together. In addition to touring with Chicagoans, Segarra has been working with Chicago independent video producer and director Jeff Perlman. Perlman is close friends with Wilson; they used to play in the band Rat Hammer together, and in the mid-2010s they ran a Humboldt Park DIY venue called the Flowershop. Wilson even officiated at Perlman’s wedding. 

Wilson connected Perlman and Segarra, and the two have since collaborated on a couple of videos for The Past Is Still Alive. They made the first, for “Hawkmoon,” in late 2023, a few months before the album came out. They shot it in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Perlman says they were inspired by indie westerns and heist films such Wild at Heart, Badlands, and Paris, Texas. Segarra, wearing a cowboy hat, joins mononymous actor-musician Denny to smash car windows with a golf club and dance on a motel bed covered with money. Perlman and his friend and codirector, Sean Kelly, drove out in a van and “two-man-banded that whole video, which was a heavy lift but super fun.” 

Perlman and Segarra made the second video, for “Buffalo,” in August and September of this year, and it’s a more direct welcome to Chicago. The song is a strummed elegy for lost creatures: “Will we go like the woolly mammoth / Or the dear dodo / Gone like the Bachman’s warbler / Disappeared like the melting snow.” Segarra’s phrasing emphasizes the ends of lines and the pauses for breath, giving the song a sense of claustrophobia and of life baffled, trapped, and yearning. 

“The lyric content just immediately conjured a museum,” Perlman says. He reached out to a contact at the Field Museum, who set up a shoot inside. For much of the video, Segarra shares the screen with taxidermied animals, playing their guitar and soulfully serenading glass-eyed deer, birds, zebra, tigers, and warthogs. 

In other footage, Segarra stands outside a pen containing live bison. Those scenes too were shot in Chicagoland. “I was like, it’d be cool if we could get live buffalo,” Perlman says. “So I just googled bison farms and found a ranch called Broken Wagon in northwest Indiana. And they were super gracious.”

Perlman loved the experience of working with Segarra, with or without bison. “They’re the perfect combination of somebody who knows what they want and has vision but also respects other people’s visions and creativity,” he says. “So it was a really easy dialogue to get on the same page. They bring so much to the table, but at the same time they have so much trust for people to do what they do. That’s a rare and pretty awesome thing.”

Segarra is still touring, but they say they’re looking forward to immersing themselves in Chicago. They’re planning to explore our jazz scene. “I was living in another jazz city, but the jazz here is very different,” they said. “New Orleans is very focused on trad jazz, and that’s the music that I learned playing on the street. I’m really excited to go to some Chicago jazz clubs and have a psychedelic experience.”

Segarra is also thinking about working with their touring band on some recordings. “I haven’t written anything yet, but I really want to use the winter to be inspired,” they say. “I have some ideas, but yeah, I definitely want to create with these guys.” 

Segarra says they’re planning to cut a single or B-side with Ogbonnaya shortly. They specifically praise the folk-tinged Kara Jackson album Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?, which Ogbonnaya produced. “That record is the best-sounding record I’ve heard in so long,” they say. 

“I love these guys,” Segarra adds. “It’s hard to make new friends in your 30s, you know?”

Ogbonnaya is also enthusiastic about the collaboration. “I just love Alynda’s lyrics so much,” he says. “Everything in their songs is so visceral, and every time I hear a lyric I can picture an image. I’m a very visual person, visual learner—have been since forever. And I think every line of theirs, I can picture where they are at that moment or what they’re thinking about. I think that’s beautiful. I don’t think a lot of people can do it the way that they can, so it just feels very special to me. And really honest.”

Ogbonnaya, who grew up here, says he thinks Segarra is a good fit for Chicago. “It goes back to just talking about honesty,” he says. “You get a kind of midwest honesty here; people aren’t going to let shit slide, like they do maybe on the coasts. Yes, I am a hater! I feel like this is a different type of honest energy here, where it just feels real. It feels, like, attainable here. People go to LA for this big dream, but shit just feels real here and more, like, working-class—people just doing it, making it happen.”

Segarra is planning to tour with Bright Eyes in February and March, this time in the south and southwest. (“I did that with the last record, and I’m excited to do it again,” they say.) They don’t have firm plans for Chicago performances yet. They’re hoping to get booked for the second annual Evanston Folk Festival in September 2025. They’ve somehow never played at the Old Town School of Folk Music, which seems like it would be a natural fit.

“It’s kind of fun when you enter into the other cycle, the next cycle of an album campaign,” they say, “because you can just be more creative and there’s a little bit more freedom in what you can do. I’d love to play a solo set or a more acoustic set, or something like that.”

In the meantime, Segarra is enjoying their new home. “Meeting people here,” they say, “feels more like where I’m at in my life. Everybody is writing music, and they’re all, like, blending genres. I feel very lucky.”