Music

Alynda Segarra remembers her roots in her music

Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff
Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff

For The Navigator, the 2017 album from Hurray for the Riff Raff, singer/songwriter and driving force Alynda Segarra wanted to branch out a bit from the roots-conscious folk she was best known for and dig into her Puerto Rican heritage.

The result was an engrossing and introspective concept album in which Segarra deftly inhabits the character of Navita Milagros Negron, a New York street kid not unlike a young Segarra, who grew up in the Bronx. Navita's story unfolds amid Riff Raff's catchy, indie-folk rock jams dusted this time around with a poetic, cityscape theatricality.

Hurray for the Riff Raff and Waxahatchee

Opening act: Beduoine

8:30 p.m. Friday, Rev Room, 300 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock

(501) 823-0090

revroom.com

Segarra and Hurray for the Riff Raff share a bill with Waxahatchee on Friday at the Rev Room in Little Rock. Beduoine will open.

Segarra, 31, who lives in New Orleans, was actually in Nashville, Tenn., when she wrote most of the album. She also revisited her old stamping grounds in New York and went to Puerto Rico a couple of times for inspiration.

"I was trying to retrace my steps, hanging out on the lower East Side and getting back in touch with growing up there," she says of going back to New York. "It was definitely an emotional experience."

The process of writing The Navigator, her fifth album with Hurray for the Riff Raff, had its challenges.

"It was the hardest thing I've written," she says. "Not only was I trying to get in touch with my childhood, but I was also trying to write a story and create a character."

She wanted to reconnect with the lower East Side environment she remembered and also comment on its transformation: "I could never truly get in touch with the world I grew up in because New York has changed so much. I wanted to tap into that change and tell the story of my character and the city that she loves that changed on her overnight."

While a lot of Segarra's earlier work is informed by the likes of Woodie Guthrie, Bessie Smith and other Americana, roots types, she explored the music her father loved when working on The Navigator.

"I was listening to a lot of Puerto Rican artists, a lot of Cuban artists, Dominican artists and the beginnings of the salsa movement," she says. "That was my dad's music. I used to see it as oldies and I was a punk kid and into rock 'n' roll. But when I starting learning about that scene, I realized that was their punk. It was this coming together of all this different folk music."

She was also digging her beloved Rodriguez, the blue-collar Mexican-American singer/songwriter from Detroit and the Ghetto Brothers, an underground Bronx group from the '70s.

"They were a street gang in the Bronx," she says. "They were all Puerto Rican and they decided to become a band and use their music to inspire people and stop gangs from fighting among each other."

The album began with songs that were more personal, but the story began to take shape when Segarra came up with tracks like "Rican Beach," with its social and political call to action and the theatrical "Pa'lante," a stirring anthem that samples poet Pedro Pietre and sounds like it came straight from a Bronx musical.

The latter has become the band's go-to set closer.

"We definitely save energy for it because we usually perform it last," she says. "There are not a lot of songs that can follow that one. It also feels like a moment when I can be vulnerable with the audience. It's this cathartic moment where you can get out a lot of frustration and fear, but also create space for hope and unity."

Weekend on 04/26/2018

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