Alela Diane is keenly aware of time passing, the unrelenting flow of seasons, the flower’s fleeting bloom—but what she cares about most deeply, is now. Don’t forget to go outside / To feel the wind / To breathe the cold air / The winter branches in these bones / Know when to bloom / Know when to bear, she sings on album standout “In My Own Time.” More than a decade into one of contemporary folk’s most quietly extraordinary careers, and emerging from her own kind of artistic winter, Alela returns rich with fruit.

The Portland songwriter’s seventh full-length album, ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’ came as the consequence of intuition, coincidence, and community. “I came to the end of a season last year,” Alela shares. “My daughters had grown a bit. I no longer had babies waking me in the middle of the night. I could hear myself think again.” More and more, those thoughts circled music.

On the first of April that 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. “I had a conversation with a friend who is a florist, and she talked about how spring is the most beautiful time to pass. How all the flowers are blooming and the light returns, how it’s a better time to grieve when rebirth is all around.” Alela wrote album track “Spring Is A Fine Time To Die” in response, a plucky homage to her dear friend, a whistling work of playful wit fit to honor his catalogue: Magnolia, Tulip, and Daphne, too / Flesh is temporary but your songs will carry on forever. Alela 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.”

She enlisted her pal Peter Lalish, of the band Lucius, to give her guitar lessons. She invited Anna Tivel for tea. “It felt imperative to connect with artists I respected and get reacquainted with my own town.” Though she’d taken the solo route on her last handful of releases, Alela was interested in a new way forward. Plucking away in the attic of her 1892 Victorian home from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon, she found new songs flickering in the dusty light—and a desire to play them with people.

Some weekend around that same time, Alela was meant to take a weekend out of town with her family. “The day we were leaving, I felt strongly, inexplicably pulled to stay—to dedicate free time to music whatever way I could.” She hugged her daughters goodbye, browsed local showlistings, and stepped out her front door. At Clay Street Studios that night, Alela met Danny Austin-Manning—a drummer on the bill, a quick new friend, and the nearly-instant conduit to the album’s creation. “We met and it all started clicking into place.” Alela invited him to play a show with her the following week. In the throes of immediate rapport, she told him she didn’t have a studio in mind for her next steps, but she did have an attic. “Danny was like, ‘I know a guy who could make that work.’”

And so, Sam Weber (Madison Cunningham, Anna Tivel) carried truckloads of gear up three flights of stairs to co-produce ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’. Along with Sebastian Owens on bass and Maggie the cat prowling over pre-amps and snuggling up in guitar cases, the band recorded fifteen songs in less than five days—all live. “No click tracks, no tricks, no fuss,” says Alela. “The wildest thing about making this record—it just came really easily. There wasn’t any second-guessing. Why isn’t this landing? Why aren’t my vocals working? I think that’s a testament to finding the right people.” Tivel contributed backing vocals and violin. Lalish 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 songs of ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’ range from lulling to raw to cinematic, with Alela’s mellifluous voice a lively and affecting instrument throughout. As the album opens, “California” traces her down the coast to her hometown of Nevada City—a wistful blur of the memories that made her, a pursuit of identity in the external world and in the past. “Galloping” follows like a fever dream. Written while bed-ridden with sickness, it’s a pressure storm within the walls of Alela’s own mind, a collage of findings from the internal present. Evocative, expansive songs set in perfect juxtaposition, they introduce the endless self-discovery this album celebrates.

“Piss, Coffee, Blood or Wine?” offers more raucous Americana. The title refers to an indiscernible puddle forming next to a man slumped over the sidewalk, an image Alela posits as the poster for suffering in the US and beyond. It's a protest romp, percussion intensifying with acute, political rage: In this land, our only home / They line their pockets with our souls / Men holding guns, and hiding money / Always at the church on Sunday.

Alela almost always writes from personal experience, her lyrics sparkling vulnerable, as on “Dusty Roses,” “Wide Open Spaces,” and perhaps most palpably, “To Be Kind.” Written from a mother to a child in a phase of ugly temperament, the song billows into a stunning and familiar image of human intimacy. Sparse strings and delicate piano underlie the tender plea—I need you to be kind / to me—as well as the promise—Even when you’re screaming, mad / I love you.

“I tend to go dark when I write,” Alela says. “But there was a deliberate intention this time to hold onto the light.” To face pain without getting lost in it requires a particular strength—one Alela has honed over a lifetime of songwriting. Her lustrous discography has gathered major critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork, NPR Music, The Guardian, and plenty more. UNCUT counted her work in their ambitious, ‘50 best singer-songwriter albums’ of all time roundup—a canon comprising John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Paul Simon—characterizing her skill as “insanely beautiful, with the strength and delicacy of spider silk.” Consequence echoed that significance, declaring, “Hers is a timeless sound, that of a wayfaring troubadour, which only seems to come a few times a generation.”

Alela’s latest collection closes with two haunting odes to the finite nature of life, Fragile As A Flame” and “Endless Waltz.” The latter is Alela’s love letter to her grandparents. “It’s beautiful and bittersweet to watch them waltz toward the unknown. All the while, the birds keep flying along on the wind, and the piles of paper collect dust on our desks.” This veneration for the inevitable, a submission to moving forward, is the ultimate wisdom of ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’ “Everything in perpetual motion,” Alela says. “We’re all just passing through.”

ALELA DIANE

WHO’S KEEPING TIME?

OUT MAY 22 ON FLUFF & GRAVY RECORDS

ALELA DIANE

WHO’S KEEPING TIME?

OUT MAY 22 ON FLUFF & GRAVY RECORDS

PRESS IMAGE BY CAMILLE BRUYA

ALBUM BIO

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Alexa Rose

Evan Honer