When making her new record Looking Glass, Alela Diane was “doing everything at once. Waking up at 6am to practice my songs and staying up late to prep the house to be ready to sell”. While raising her daughters, renovating that house and becoming familiar with the delights of social media, it is a minor miracle Alela found the time and energy to muster up a new album. We will be thankful.

You don’t need me to tell you this but I will anyway - we are living through troubled times. At the end of your working day (whatever it is you do) when you look wistfully out of the window, it’s getting harder to feel something good. Optimism is more like a professional occupation than a natural state of being. If you sympathise with what I’m saying, I bring you good tidings - in the form of new music from Alela Diane. Her new record will provide you a clearer, calmer vista. 

Just spending four minutes watching the video to the recent ‘single’ When We Believed may begin to change your perspective. It’s Alela sweeping her porch and letting the cat out and I don’t think I’ve seen a better video this year - certainly not one with a lower budget. Not just because it sends up the glamour & glitz of the usual music video fare, but represents many of the inherent qualities in Alela’s music - a genre that truly belongs in the slow music club. As she succinctly says: “It’s a protest against how quickly everything moves”. 

I first came across Alela Diane through purchasing her early albums To Be Still (2009) and About Farewell (2013), both fine records in the American folk tradition. I didn’t listen to her remarkable debut The Pirate’s Gospel until it was reissued in 2018 but it blows me away every time I do. It was 2017’s Cusp that made me a fan. Cusp was my favourite record of that year, capturing all the epic dramas and mysteries of life from within the family home. That album was a step-up for Alela’s career with two singles, Emigré and Ether & Wood reaching 10 million streams on Spotify alone. 

With all the music we have coming at us these days, finding that one whole album that clicks and demands repeated listening is an increasingly rare and precious thing. But that’s especially true for the kind of music Alela makes - soothing, meditative, always moving and ultimately uplifting. Something we all might need a bit more of no doubt. 

In our conversation for the Art of Longevity, we talk about these dark times, as well as the difficulty of cutting through the clutter, the content abyss of 2022, when you make music in the same vein as Joni Mitchell did in the 70s i.e. music that demands to be listened to and not just heard. 

Having helped pave the way, Alela remains at the heart of a very strong current movement for female troubadours - a scene driven by the success of the likes of Sharon Van Etten, Angel Oslen, Julien Baker and even Phoebe Bridgers - but harking back to Joni Mitchell. It was Cat Power that proved an inspiration to Alela herself when she first started out making The Pirate’s Gospel, then aged 19. 

It has taken almost five years for Alela to create another record since Cusp. Between raising her two young daughters (making a lot of snacks), renovating her Portland home and like all of us - getting through the global pandemic - it has taken time, graft and discipline to craft songs to a standard she has set for herself. But once she got into the studio (not just any studio but Tucker Martine’s ‘Flora’ in Northeast Portland, Oregon) the songs were recorded quickly. The new album Looking Glass processes the themes of domesticity, love & loss and how to face these dark times. In Alela’s words the record is about:

“Feeling the lightness and the darkness of the world at large. How do you get through your day-to-day life? How do we create a sweet, peaceful world for your children when there’s a lot of chaos out there”.

We can feel better already.