Alela Diane

More than a decade into one of contemporary folk’s most quietly extraordinary careers, Alela Diane returns on May 22 with Who’s Keeping Time? via Fluff & Gravy / Loose Music.
The Portland songwriter’s seventh full-length album came as the consequence of intuition, coincidence, and community. On the first of April last year, Michael Hurley, folk legend and indispensable presence in the Portland music scene, died at the age of eighty-three. “I was absolutely gutted,” says Alela, who didn’t just revere Hurley but knew him well. She performed in a tribute show for Hurley, and in that collective mourning, found solace and inspiration. “It was an epiphany to realize how much I missed my community. I felt very clear about what I wanted in that moment—I want to be alive. I want to see live music. I want to play it.”
Though she’d taken the solo route on her last handful of releases, Alela was interested in a new way forward. Plucking the day away in the attic of her 1892 Victorian home, she found new songs flickering in the dusty light—and a desire to play them with people.
Alela met drummer Danny Austin-Manning at Clay Street Studios one night and he introduced her to co-producer Sam Weber (Madison Cunningham, Anna Tivel). Along with Sebastian Owens on bass, they recorded fifteen songs in less than five days—all live in the very attic where she wrote them. Anna Tivel contributed backing vocals and violin. Peter Lalish, of the band Lucius, added guitar. Fellow Pacific Northwesterners Kati Claborn and Luke Ydstie of Blind Pilot and AC Sapphire provided overdubs of all kinds. Alela’s vision for uninhibited music and revived, creative kinship thrust her into a new season.
The result is an 11-track set ranging from lulling to raw to cinematic, with Alela’s mellifluous voice a lively and affecting instrument throughout. The lyrics reveal an artist with the particular kind of strength required to face pain without getting lost—an ability Alela has honed over a lifetime of songwriting, during which her lustrous discography has garnered major critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork, NPR Music, The Guardian, and plenty more. UNCUT has characterized her skill as “insanely beautiful, with the strength and delicacy of spider silk” while counting her work among the ‘50 best singer-songwriter albums’ of all time—a canon comprising John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Paul Simon. Consequence has echoed that significance, declaring, “Hers is a timeless sound, that of a wayfaring troubadour, which only seems to come a few times a generation.”
With Who’s Keeping Time?, Alela Diane transforms grief into gathering, reaffirming her place as a vital, living force in contemporary folk music—rooted in community, presence, and the enduring power of song.