Acclaimed Portland-based singer-songwriter Alela Diane will return with Who's Keeping Time? on May 22 via Loose Music. It serves as the seventh installment in one of contemporary folk’s most quietly extraordinary careers, and one shaped by loss, intuition, and a renewed pull toward 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.” Plucking 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.
Though she has taken the solo route on her last handful of releases, Alela was interested in a more collective, collaborative way forward this time. She 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 from the very attic where Alela 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 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.