Alela Diane has announced her seventh album, Who’s Keeping Time?, due May 22nd via Loose Music / Fluff & Gravy, alongside the release of lead single California. It is her debut on Loose, and arrives as one of the most emotionally charged chapters of a career already marked by loss, intuition, and rare lyrical grace.
The album was born, in part, from grief. On the first of April last year, folk legend Michael Hurley — an indispensable presence in Portland’s music community — died at the age of eighty-three. Diane, who knew and revered him deeply, performed at a tribute show in his memory and found in that collective mourning something clarifying. “It was an epiphany to realize how much I missed my community,” she has said. “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.”
New songs came quickly — plucked out in the attic of her 1892 Victorian home in Portland — and so did a desire to play them with others. Recorded in just ten days alongside drummer Danny Austin-Manning, co-producer Sam Weber (Madison Cunningham, Anna Tivel), and bassist Sebastian Owens, the eleven-track album was captured largely live from the same attic where it was written. Anna Tivel, Blind Pilot’s Kati Claborn and Luke Ydstie, and Lucius guitarist Peter Lalish all contributed. Diane describes the album as a “musing on life’s seasons — fleeting truths of beauty and chaos.”
Lead single California distils that philosophy into something spare and luminous. Moving through images of golden hills and marigolds, screen doors slamming and headlights cutting through pre-dawn blackness, the song maps a return to a childhood home with the kind of quiet precision Diane does better than almost anyone. The narrator summons angels on backroads and reaches for faces whose names escape her — “shaky recognition,” she sings, of people half-remembered from a former life. It is a song about the way places hold us even as time loosens our grip on them.
“I wrote this song after a quick trip down to the tiny California town where I grew up,” Diane says. “No matter how much time passes, part of my heart will always live among those golden hills. On this particular visit, I found myself talking to a woman who I clearly must have known in a former chapter of life, but I couldn’t place her. Time sure can move through like a wildfire. All that’s left are muted memories, elusive as ghosts.”
Alela Diane will tour Europe and the US Pacific Northwest in support of the album, including an appearance at Pickathon Music Festival (dates below).
Who’s Keeping Time? is available to pre-order now: https://lnk.to/whoskeepingtime
Alela Diane On Tour:
May 22 — Zurich, CH @ Rote Fabrik (w/ Two Runner)
May 23 — Schorndorf, DE @ Manufaktur (w/ Two Runner)
May 24 — Beverungen, DE @ Orange Blossom Festival
May 25 — Rotterdam, NL @ LantarenVenster (w/ Two Runner)
May 26 — Deventer, NL @ Burgerweeshuis (w/ Two Runner)
May 28 — London, UK @ Rough Trade Denmark Street
June 12 — Trout Lake, WA @ Trout Lake Hall
June 13 — Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios
June 18 — Seattle, WA @ Sunset Tavern
July 3 — Nürnberg, DE @ St. Katharina Open Air
July 30-August 2 — Happy Valley, OR @ Pickathon