ALYNDA Lee Segarra remembers a campfire. The mastermind behind the radical-roots band Hurray For The Riff Raff (who use they/them pronouns) may be sitting in an empty courtyard in New Orleans on a chilly afternoon, but they close their eyes and drift back to a time when they and their friends hitchhiked and hopped freight trains. One night they found themselves in the middle of nowhere, stranded on what they discovered was a superfund site – essentially a toxic waste dump. “We were really cold and we needed a campfire. All the wood was treated chemically, but we were drinking and we were cold and we thought, ‘What the hell!’”
Despite their best efforts to rummage through their memory, Segarra can’t recall exactly where that superfund site was located. Was it Nebraska? Kansas? One of the Dakotas? Much of the past has become a blur, but that memory inspired a short lyric on The Past Is Still Alive, Hurray For The Riff Raff’s new roadside memorial of an album. It was a breakthrough for the singer-songwriter, not because it inspired some ornate turn of phrase — the line is simply, “campfire on a superfund site” – but because it was enough in and of itself.
“It felt like I had finally found the lexicon that was really true to me,” Segarra says. “I felt like I was able to speak in my own language. That’s why it felt so good to write this album – even the most brutal parts, like that night at the superfund site. So much of the work of the writer is to find your language and find your characters, and that line in particular made me feel like I had arrived somewhere. It’s not the final destination, but it is a destination.”
Shivering in their loose denim jacket, Segarra admits they could use a campfire right now. Winter – or
