When local folk legend Michael Hurley died last spring, his friend Alela Diane was inspired to write “Spring Is A Fine Time (To Die),” an homage to her friend and his career.
The song helped catalyze the making of her new album, which was recorded live in the attic of her Portland home.
Diane joins us in the studio, along with fellow musician Peter Lalish, for a conversation and live performance.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. “There is a story behind every song,” my next guest has written. For about 20 years, Alela Diane has turned those stories about loss and longing, about home and memory, about childhood and parenthood into haunting, finely crafted songs. Her new album, which was recorded in the attic of her Portland house, is called “Who’s Keeping Time?” It comes out on May 22.
Alela Diane joins us now, along with some of the musicians who played on the album. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Alela Diane: Thanks for having me.
Miller: I was hoping we could start with a song from the new album, the first song.
Diane: Sounds good. This one’s called “California.”
[“California” by Alela Diane playing, performed live in studio]
Golden Hills
Along the highway
Quiet yearning
Marigold
Muted memory
Dancing pictures
California, I’ve returned [whistling]
Little sister
In the shallows
Laughing down the
Hallways of my mind
I hear the screen door
Slam behind her
California, treat her kind [whistling]
All these faces
Names escape me
I can’t place it
But I’ve known you before
Time makes for
Shaky recognition
California, California, I am home
California, I am home
California, I am home [whistling]
Winding river
Headlights blinding
In the blackness
Before dawn
I summon angels
On the backroads
California, I am gone
California, I am gone [whistling]
[Song ends]
Miller: That was so lovely. Thank you. That’s “California” from Alela Diane’s new album. It’s coming out in about a week-and-a-half. It’s called “Who’s Keeping Time?” Lovely whistling too, by the way.
Diane: Thank you.
Miller: You grew up in the gold rush town of Nevada City, California. What was it like?
Diane: It’s a very small little town, beautiful place, wonderful place to grow up. Yeah, I’d always thought I’d move back there, but I didn’t. [Laughs]
Miller: What made it a wonderful place to grow up?
Diane: Well, it’s a small community that really nurtures the arts. I grew up singing in the choir. My parents are musicians. They played a lot of little shows around town. Beautiful pine trees, a river to swim in and just a lot of music around, yeah, and just feeling like that was normal in people’s lives, going to potlucks, and all the adults passing instruments around and singing together.
Miller: You’ve said your parents played bluegrass, folk, rock, a Grateful Dead cover band that your dad was in.
Diane: Grateful Dead cover band, yep.
Miller: But you didn’t play with them growing up at those potlucks. So, what seeped into you, even if you weren’t playing along?
Diane: Well, it was just around so much and I always did love singing. [I] sang in the school choir. But it wasn’t until everything kind of fell apart that I found my voice and started writing songs. Shortly after I graduated high school, my parents divorced, they sold our family home and I really had no place to go back to. I had all my stuff in my college dorm. And that’s when I started writing. My dad could play guitar and showed me a couple of chords, but beyond that, I just started teaching myself to play guitar. It was just a couple notes and a couple chords to begin with, but that was all I needed to write my first songs.
Miller: And at that point, writing songs was a way to make sense of what was happening of those losses?
Diane: It was, yeah. So, for me, the original reason I started writing was to kind of process that grief and the loss of everything I had known and that stability of my childhood.
Miller: When you were doing that, was there a part of you that thought, I want to perform these, or you hadn’t even arrived there yet?
Diane: I wasn’t there yet. I just started writing the songs in my bedroom in San Francisco. I was there for college for a couple of years. And I remember the first time I performed for just a handful of friends, and those friends being like, “whoa, you should do this.” And I think within that year, I just sort of started playing little, tiny shows around Nevada City. I opened for Joanna Newsom, who’s also from Nevada City in San Francisco, because we were both living there at the time. That was in like 2003, so it’s very exciting.
Miller: So I’m wondering, what was it like to hear your friends say, “whoa, you should do this?”
Diane: I think it was surprising and exciting. It was the thing I loved doing the most. I mean, it really took me by surprise that I did start doing this professionally. My very first record, the one that was released, “The Pirate’s Gospel,” I had recorded with my dad in his music studio during the summer of 2004. We had no idea anyone would hear that record. And it’s not a widely known record in the USA. But overseas, it got a lot of traction and it went gold in France. And that was completely astonishing from this project that my dad and I just made together, thinking that no one would hear it.
Miller: Can we hear another song?
Diane: Yeah, absolutely.
Miller: I think this is “Dusty Roses” from the new album.
Diane: OK, “Dusty Roses.” Let me just make sure this is in tune real quick. [Tuning guitar] Sorry about that technicalities.
Miller: We like in tune guitars.
Diane: We do.
Miller: I should say, while she is making sure the guitar is in tune, there’s a European tour for the record release, but Alela Diane is going to be back in the Northwest next month. You can see her at Trout Lake Hall in Washington on June 12 and at Mississippi Studios in Portland on June 13.
Diane: Awesome. OK. This next song. It’s called “Dusty Roses” and it’s about a friend of mine from my hometown. Sometimes things don’t go as well when you’re from a small town.
[“Dusty Roses” by Alela Diane playing, performed live in studio]
Grew up in the valley
Rode horses at dawn
Came home every morning
To the TV on
Big blue eyes
Long straight hair
Some dark secret
Held like a key
Dusty Roses
Strung up on the wall
Dusty Roses
Where has our girl gone?
Black pants and a crisp white shirt
Table for two
Party of ten, it’s one AM
She gets off work
Goes downtown
Whiskey drowned
Find some stranger
To hold like a key
Dusty Roses
Strung up on the wall
Dusty Roses
Where has our girl gone?
[Song ends]
Miller: That’s “Dusty Roses” from Alela Diane’s new or forthcoming album “Who’s Keeping Time?” We heard Alela on vocals and guitar. We also have Peter Lalish on guitar, Sebastian Owens on bass and Danny Austin-Manning on drums.
I mentioned at the beginning that you recorded the new album in your attic.
Diane: I did.
Miller: Can you describe your attic?
Diane: Yeah, so I live in this crazy old house in Southeast Portland. It’s a big Victorian, it’s one of a kind. It’s the weirdest house in Eastmoreland, has a tower. It was a little crumbly when we got it five years ago, but it’s an incredible house and the history is so alive in there. It’s a wonderful, magical place to live.
Miller: Could you feel that history when you were recording?
Diane: I would say so. I feel it every day of my life when I just exist living in that house. It’s like a lost-in-time house.
Miller: I’ve read that the town where you grew up, a gold rush, gold mining town, it’s talked about as a Victorian town.
Diane: This is why I ended up in a crazy Victorian.
Miller: You saw this as a piece of my old home here?
Diane: Yeah, I didn’t grow up in a Victorian, but the road that led to where I lived – every day I would drive down this street called Nevada Street – is lined with the most incredible Victorian houses. And my childhood dollhouse was a Victorian. It’s always just been this thing for me, so I landed there in Portland. We found a very unique place to live. [Laughs]
Miller: You’ve said that one of the big catalysts for this album was the death, about a year ago, of a good friend of yours, a famous musician named Michael Hurley. [He’s] the kind of musician that’s a foundational artist for plenty of people, but also unknown to plenty of people – sort of a funny combination.
Diane: For sure.
Miller: Can you tell us about him?
Diane: I met Michael when I moved to the Northwest. I moved here in 2005, and I think he and I crossed paths probably in 2006 or 2007. And I met him through a drummer I was working with at the time named Otto Hauser, and he drove me out to Michael’s house. So I met Michael outside of Astoria in his little, mossy house out there and we had some tea. We ended up doing shows together locally and also as far away as Scotland. We did a couple of shows in Scotland together, probably in 2008 or so.
Miller: You were in your twenties. He was in his sixties?
Diane: Yeah.
Miller: What was the musical connection between the two of you?
Diane: Well, I was always really fascinated by the very old music, and here was Michael Hurley, who was essentially a local legend. His very first recordings were out on Smithsonian Folkways, and I was familiar with those recordings. And I think I had first heard of him because Cat Power covered a handful of his songs, I think it was on her covers record. So that was when I had first heard his songs. And then, of course, I went and discovered the original recordings of the songs.
Michael and I continued to know each other. And the last show we did together was February of 2020, right before everything went south on us.
Miller: Let’s listen to just a little bit of one of his songs. It’s called “Wild Geeses.”
[“Wild Geeses” by Michael Hurley playing]
Miller: What did you learn from Michael Hurley?
Diane: I learned that you can do this music thing any way that you want to do it. I had a lot of admiration for the way that he always did music on his own terms. I mean, he was selling burnt copies of his CDs that had been released on record labels, because he was like, “why would I pay them?” He was like, “why would I pay them for my own record? I can just make copies of it and sell it to my fans.” [Laughter] The business stuff didn’t make sense to him. He was a total outsider and continued to play very humble shows. And I just love that you can do it any way you want to do it.
Miller: Do you mind if we play a little bit of the track from your new album that you wrote in honor of him?
Diane: Yeah, absolutely.
Miller: This is called “Spring Is a Fine Time.”
[“Spring Is a Fine Time” by Alela Diane playing]
Miller: Your last two albums were more or less solo affairs, but you reached out to fellow musicians a lot more for this one. Why?
Diane: It gets really lonesome when you do it alone all the time. And I think circumstantially, I have two daughters, 12 and 9 years old, and my career really went through a big transition when I had the girls. It was much more difficult to tour. I continued touring but mostly in Europe, because that’s where my career is more successful. It was just too hard to make it a big affair and to bring a bunch of people into the project. I toured solo, I toured as a duo, sometimes, occasionally a trio, but beyond that, the bigger band thing hadn’t felt like the move for me for a while.
But when I went to Hurley’s memorial, I was reminded of all of the wonderful musicians in the Portland music community and I started going to shows again for the first time in over a decade because I was too tired to go out ever. And what I found is all these incredible musicians out there making incredible music and it was inspiring. And that’s how I met the guys that are playing with me today. And I just wanted to play music with people again. I think I had more bandwidth available than I’ve had in a long time. I wanted to come back at it with some freshness and some energy. And I’m honored to be working with some great musicians. We recorded the album in the attic, live.
Miller: In five days?
Diane: In five days, yeah.
Miller: Well, let’s hear another live song.
Diane: Perfect.
Miller: If you all don’t mind. Again, let me just remind folks again, we’re hearing Alela Diane on guitar and vocals along with Danny Austin-Manning on drums, Sebastian Owens on bass, Peter Lalish on guitar. What do you have for us?
Diane: This one is called “Galloping.”
[“Galloping” by Alela Diane playing, performed live in studio]
Miller: That’s the song “Galloping” on Alela Diane’s new album “Who’s Keeping Time?” Those bursts of images are so evocative: “Chewing on time/chipped my tooth/decades’ worth of bad news/wind so cold/chapped our skin.” “Bones clank together/like a puppet fight.” I love that. [Laughter]
Twenty years in, what are the mysteries about where songs come from?
Diane: Wow, that is one of the greatest mysteries because you have nothing and then, all of a sudden, this thing that didn’t exist kind of comes from the ether and you pull it down like a thread.
Miller: That’s what it feels like.
Diane: That’s what it feels like.
Miller: It feels like it’s there…
Diane: It’s there.
Miller: And it comes to you, as opposed to you workmanlike making this and cranking it out.
Diane: You have to open the channel for sure. And sometimes it doesn’t come as easily, or maybe something came through, and then the chorus isn’t quite right, and you fuss with it, and you wait for it, and you keep writing it different ways, and it’s terrible. Then you keep working on it. But usually if you’re patient, it does land eventually.
Miller: Alela, thanks so much for coming in. It was a pleasure talking with you.
Diane: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Miller: Alela Diane is a Portland-based singer-songwriter. Her seventh album, her new album, comes out in about a week-and-a-half. It’s called “Who’s Keeping Time?” Again, you can see her and the band when they come back to the States after a European tour. They’ll be at Trout Lake Hall in Washington on June 12 and at Mississippi Studios in Portland on June 13.
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