Hurray For The Riff Raff: Small Town Heroes (Interview)

Alynda Lee Segarra is a New York City native of Puerto Rican descent who grew up listening to doo wop and punk rock, began riding freight trains at age 17 and eventually landed in New Orleans where she fronts a band called Hurray For The Riff Raff. The band’s music is a blend of old timey folk, blues, hillbilly and doo-wop and their fifth album, Small Town Heroes, has just been released. With a show scheduled at Auckland’s Tuning Fork on Friday, November 21st, Alynda recently spoke to The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda about life in New Orleans, dressing up as The Ramones on Halloween, and the recent US mid-term elections.

Listen to the interview with Alynda Lee Segarra of Hurray For The Riff Raff here:

Or read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: You guys just had an election over there, is that right?

AS: Yes, no one’s happy about it.

MD: Yeah, I had a feeling that might be the case.

AS: Yeah. There are some women I really wanted to win, especially in Texas and they didn’t, so I’m a little sad about it. Everyone’s a little confused I think.

MD: Yeah.

AS: We’ll survive.

MD: I was watching some of the results and the way that the districts had been cut up and, I guess they call it gerrymandering and it didn’t seem like that the Democrats had much of a chance, especially in Texas, the way it was divided up into things, so.

AS: Yeah, yeah.

MD: Anyway, is that how it is in New Orleans as well?

AS: Oh actually, New Orleans, I’m really, I got to figure out what’s going on because they, it was so close for our senator that they’re doing a runoff.

MD: Oh okay.

AS: Yeah, so we’ll see what happening tomorrow.

MD: And do you follow politics fairly closely?

AS: It depends, you know. Sometimes it gets a little bit too much for me but I actually try to pay attention to the people that inspire me, which, you know, like Wendy Davis who is running in Texas.

MD: Right.

AS: I think like more social politics is what I end up following. I’m really curious, I’m also fascinated just by the current state of how people are treating each other, you know, to really simplify it, that’s what really gets me thinking and inspired about writing songs and stuff.

MD: Right, right. So those would be more social issues like I guess the stuff that was going on in Missouri recently, with the police and all.

AS: Yeah. Yeah definitely. Yeah, everything that’s going on in Missouri is so fascinating. I follow a lot of, actually, the young activists that are in Ferguson on social media and it’s been really amazing to see how strong that movement is still going, you know, really seems like they’re not going anywhere. They’re really determined to try to get some kind of justice for Michael Brown and it’s stuff like that, it makes me so excited about my generation, you know, just to see them really putting all of this heart into a movement like that.

MD: Right, right. Yeah because it seems like it’s been a while since anybody has actually kind of got active in these kind of things.

AS: Yeah, I think it’s going on about 80 days, I think, it’s what I read the other day and they’re not, we’re not even sure there’s gonna be an indictment for the officer that killed him. So I definitely think once that decision comes out there will be some kind of, I’m sure there’s gonna be some kind of reaction from the public, you know. But it really, like I said, it’s just so inspiring to see people my age really care about something.

MD: Yeah.

AS: You know, feel and bond to come together and create something together.

MD: Yeah. Now, you’ve been living in New Orleans for how long?

AS: On and off for 10 years, I first came here when I was 17 but I was still very, just kind of, wandering. So I didn’t have my own, like a house with anyone until I was about 19, but when I first came here at 17 and was really in and out a lot and really saw it as kind of a home base.

MD: Right and what is it about New Orleans made you decide that, that would be your home base as opposed to any place else that you could have landed in?

AS: Definitely the music and just the overall feeling from the people, you know, it’s a very outdoors kind of culture. People are very friendly, you know, the music is very public, the morning is public, everything is out with everybody else. Even though New York can be such an isolating place, I grew up, you know, going outside all the time, hanging out on our stoop and people actually talking to each other a lot.

MD: Yeah.

AS: So that felt very calming to me, it felt very much like what I was familiar with. It was when I travelled the country and went to places where it wasn’t very diverse or where people are very closed off that I felt really, kind of uncomfortable. So New Orleans felt, just felt welcoming and also I knew that I had so much to learn from being here, even though I didn’t consider myself a musician. I immediately started meeting really young musicians who were playing on the street and that became my livelihood, you know, all of a sudden I had a way to make money and I had something to focus my energy on and to learn.

MD: I just was in New Orleans for the first time ever at the end of July and I thought it was fantastic. It reminded me a bit of Austin, Texas because you could walk down the street and there were just bands playing everywhere and stuff. So, yeah, it’s a pretty inspiring place to be I guess if you’re a musician especially.

AS: Oh definitely. You can really, you can play every day of the week here, you know, you can play multiple gigs a day and it’s such a great place for a musician to make a life for themselves and to always get better and to also not really have to, kind of cater to an industry idea, you know, New Orleans is not really a music industry place, it’s more of a live music place that people just play what they wanna play, I mean definitely there’s a lot of traditional jazz but no one’s here trying to get on the radio or trying to get on TV, everyone’s just kind of being themselves and it’s funny, Treme got everyone on TV anyway.

MD: That’s right. So I was hoping to talk to you a bit about your latest album, Small Town Heroes, and I know that it’s your fifth album, I believe that you’ve done overall, but for a lot of people because it’s on a relatively major label, it will be the first time they’ve been exposed to you. Is that kind of weird for you to run into so many people who may have only just discovered you when you’ve kind of been doing it for a while?

AS: Actually I’m so happy about that because I feel like we’ve learned a lot and I feel like we learned, we learned in a very public way just like New Orleans, you know.

MD: Yeah.

AS: I learned a lot about song writing, I learned a lot about stage presence or even playing guitar, you know, I kind of did that all while being in the band and while recording. So Small Town Heroes finally felt like a place where I felt very comfortable in my song writing, you know, the band feels comfortable and we kind of knew, we finally found out what we did best. So I’m actually really happy for this to be an introduction to everyone and I think it truly represents us well.

MD: Right. It seems like there is, you know, fairly diverse types of music, there’s folk and blues and kind of hillbilly music, little bit of doo-wop in there. Was that always in your music or is this something that kind of distilled relatively recently?

AS: You know, when I first started playing I was writing really stylized songs, they were very similar to what was going on in the New Orleans music scene at the time, which was a lot of kind of like Gypsy, minor-key, waltzy songs.

MD: Right.

AS:  They were very dark and kind of carnival-esque. So as I got older, I actually felt like I started going back to my original influences, you know, to what I listened to with my parents, what I listened to on the way to school, stuff like that, before I started, you know, kind of bringing that into the punk music I started listening to and then finally all the, you know, early blues and American folk music that I found when I started travelling. It was kinda like taking from all parts of my life and that’s when I started to feel like it was me, you know, it was complicated, it was a lot of different mixtures, you know, there’s definitely a lot of doo-wop in there cause’ that’s what my family listened to when I was growing up.

MD: You listen to doo-wop when you were growing up?

AS: Yeah, definitely. That was huge in the Bronx when they were kids, you know, I grew up with my aunt and uncle and that was the music that they loved. So I grew up watching Jerry Lewis movies and watching Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and then listening to, you know, The Ronettes on the radio, it was kind of like, ‘what time period is this, is this the early 60s, what time is it’. So I was really influenced by that as a kid and then, you know, as I got older, its more angsty…I started finding punk rock but…

MD: Right.

AS: …it felt really good to bring all those things together and it felt very much like a growing process.

MD: Well I noticed that you and the band dressed up as The Ramones for Halloween and the Ramones are definitely the kind of band that tied together that early 60s era with, obviously with punk and kind of, yeah.

AS: That is so true. Yeah, they’re really one of the only punk bands that when I go back and listen to them, I’m like, these are just great songs, they’re doo-wop songs, you know, kind of Buddy Holly songs.

MD: Yeah.

AS: It’s really awesome. You know, we actually covered Do You Wanna Dance, we did a cover of a cover.

MD: Right, right. Did you dress up as The Ramones and play or was that just a photo-shoot?

AS: No, we dressed up and we played. I had to keep the wig hair out of my harmonica.

MD: I don’t remember Joey Ramone playing the harmonica but maybe…

AS: I know…

MD: Now one of the songs that’s been getting quite a bit of attention is The Body Electric and I know, it’s kind of like an anti-murder ballad, I guess that’s one way to describe it.

Listen to The Body Electric here:

AS: Yeah.

MD: It was interesting. I just saw an Australian performer who sings kind of old time blues and he was talking about murder ballads and how he didn’t understand them because there was never any, there never seemed to be any motive for the murder which didn’t make any sense to him, so he was confused about them. The poor girl was always just, you know, knocked off for no apparent reason so.

AS: Yeah. It’s true, it’s true.

MD: But I know there’s a more serious story behind the reason that you wrote that and it’s been getting quite a bit of attention and you’ve started The Body Electric Fund and I was hoping you would tell me a little bit about what that was.

AS: Yeah. You know, The Body Electric has been another kind of growing period for me as a songwriter because I have this really clear vision of what I really wanted to do, which was write a response to murder ballads, you know, a female response I guess.

MD: Yeah.

AS: And then it turned into a very feminist statement, just about how it feels to be a woman in the world and feel under attack and feel unsafe. Then it kind of grew, you know, once I started reading about Trayvon Martin, once I started reading about Michael Brown, I started thinking more about all the people in especially, you know, my country that feel like we live in a culture of violence that just normalizes their deaths, you know.

MD: Yeah.

AS: The death of Michael Brown became very normalized immediately. There’s a very clear, you know, way that this machine, for a lack of a better word, works like, you know, a young black man gets killed and then immediately the next day you find out oh he smoked weed when he was a teenager or something.

MD: Right, yeah.

AS: It’s like there’s no room for grief, there’s no room for despair or for anger and I really related to that as a woman, just feeling like I also live in a culture that normalizes the death of women to the point that I could sit at a bar and hear a guy sing a song about shooting his girlfriend because she was having an affair or something and kind of saying a gruesome tale about it and everybody’s just kind of talking like nothing’s going on, you know. So I, you know I wrote the song and then it started, it’s kind of so simple that it could mean so much, you know, whoever is the narrator can change whether it’s a woman saying you’re talking about shooting me, you’re talking about me being taken away and I wanna know what that is gonna do for us as people, or it could be a person of colour or it could be queer person.

MD: Yeah.

AS: There’s definitely this question of where is this violence gonna take us, you know, we could get very good at disassociating and we can get very good at not caring about each other, or, but I don’t know where that’s gonna really get us in the long run and I don’t know where that’s gonna get our children, you know.

MD: Yeah. I know you’re gonna be in New Zealand in about 2 weeks. So is the entire band coming along? What kind of show are you planning on doing when you get here, give us a little preview.

AS: Yeah. We got the full band which I’m so excited about. I think that really shows what we’re best at, you know, we’re definitely gonna do some of my more singer songwriter songs and also kind of try to bring all the influences, play the dancey songs cause’ I’m pretty sure that people in New Zealand like to dance, at least I hope.

MD: That’s true.

AS: So, you know, we’ll try to do the whole, the whole spectrum of what we’re good at.

Hurray For The Riff Raff perfoprm at The Tuning Fork on Friday, November 21st. Click here for more details.