In 2024, Alynda Segarra released “The Past is Still Alive,” the eighth studio album under the moniker Hurray for the Riff Raff. On tour that year, Segarra was backed by a band made up of heavy-hitting Chicago musicians, including Sen Morimoto and Nnamdi Ogbonnaya. Together, their sound clicked.
“I’ve been touring for a long time, but I feel like this is the most fun I’ve ever had on stage,” said Segarra, 39. “And just like the best band I’ve ever had.”
The experience inspired the Bronx native to move to Chicago full time, and to capture the energy of the moment with a new live album “Live Forever,” recorded last summer at the Old Town School of Folk Music. The album comes out digitally on Friday and in record form on May 8 via New York label Nonesuch Records.
“After being on the road with this group, I was like, if there’s anything I really want to put in a time capsule, it’s this feeling that we have together,” said Segarra, who called the album a “love letter to working-class musicians,” including those in the band, which is rounded out by guitarist Parker Grogan and drummer Marcus Drake.
The project, produced by Chicago’s Johnny Wilson, includes the entirety of the critically acclaimed record “The Past is Still Alive,” which was largely inspired by Segarra’s time riding freight rails across the country as a teenager. The musician ultimately settled in New Orleans, a city that provided inspiration for much of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s catalog. But after nearly 20 years there, Segarra said, “I’d been really needing to make a change in my life.” So, Segarra left the Big Easy for Chicago.
The live album also includes some songs from that period, including “Precious Cargo,” a 2022 song that decries Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which Segarra wrote after spending time with individuals in detention centers in southern Louisiana and Mississippi.
“It really pained me that so many years later [the song] became even more relevant. So we started playing it live again,” Segarra said.
Since moving to Chicago, the singer has found camaraderie among fellow musicians and energy in the city’s creative scene and Midwest niceness. “I definitely need to live in a place where I’m surrounded by other artistic people and also a place that I can afford to pay rent, to be real,” Segarra said. “Chicago has been so welcoming to me and so loving to me.”
“The Past is Still Alive” opens with the album’s breakout hit. On “Alibi,” Segarra’s distinctive folky voice comes in with this line: “You don’t have to die if you don’t wanna die. You can take it all back in the nick of time.”
That bit of poetry is where the project began for Segarra. “That was the first lyric that came to me. That happens sometimes, I’ll get a line and it’ll become the guiding light,” said the musician, who uses they/them pronouns. “It’s kind of like a pinpoint on a map, and I’m like, I don’t know how to get there, but I know that’s the town I need to get to.”
The song was born in the months before Segarra’s father died. The musician was also navigating a period of self doubt as a musician — and wondering how they fit in, to what they call a “hyper modern” music industry. “So, there are a lot of different places that line was taking me. It was me trying to convince myself: I can still do this, I can survive, I can shift, I can transform.”
“I found it really spooky, obviously, to have written this song and then to go through losing my dad,” they said. “Just to be kind of face-to-face with these different representations of death. Some are very final. Some are the end of a chapter. “
When the song took off, Segarra felt like it was the validation they needed to keep going. “I felt like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re gonna do this thing.”
The album’s title track, which is also called “Snake Plant,” dives deep into their years on the road. On the track, Segarra sings, “Play my song for the barrel of freaks. And we go shoplifting when it’s time to eat, and they don’t even really know my name. I’m so happy that we escaped from where we came.”
Segarra is a long way from that reality now. Looking back on those years, they said it feels like it was another person entirely who lived that life. But still, Segarra wanted to write something for young people who feel lost — the way they did.
“I was just thinking a lot about younger generations of radical youth, of kids that feel really stuck and feel like they have no future, and just trying to create some kind of historical document in a song of what I was able to find,” Segarra said. “To send it out into the world and be like, ‘I hope you can find your people like this.’”
Segarra has found their people here, in the Midwest, where the seasons have brought inspiration for new work.
“I’ve been writing. I’m really grateful to have a winter,” they said. “Maybe in two years, I won’t say that, but I have been really grateful to have time to stay home and be cozy and really get into the craft of songwriting.”
Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.