When Michael Hurley, a key figure in the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s and 1970s – and personal friend of Alela Diane – died in April last year, it had a major impact on Diane, who expressed deep grief at the news. However, one positive outcome was her participation in a tribute show for Hurley, leading Diane to reassess her relationship with her art and her local music community, inspiring the songs that comprise her latest, and possibly greatest, release to date, Who’s Keeping Time?
Diane’s more recent albums, Looking Glass, About Farewell, and Cusp, were notable for their somewhat humble and restrained production values. Her newfound enthusiasm for working with fellow musicians coincided with a desire to re-restablish the richness of sound and mood that she achieved on an earlier album,To Be Still, released in 2009 – on which she played with a full band for the first time – while 2026 also saw Diane reaching a stage in her life when her daughters had reached an age that means she has more time and room to indulge her musical pursuits.
Recorded in only ten days in the attic of her 1892 Victorian home – where she also wrote the material – Diane worked on the songs on ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’ with co-producer Sam Weber, who has collaborated previously with the likes of Madison Cunningham and Anna Tivel (who guests on this release). And it’s a relationship that has clearly paid dividends, with Weber’s production, alongside a mulitiplicity of contributions from Tivel on fiddle and backing vocals, Peter Lalish on guitar, Danny Austin-Manning on drums and percussion, Sebastian Owens on bass, and Blind Pilot’s Kati Claborn on banjo, clarinet and dulcimer, and Luke Ydstie on backing vocals, lap steel, octave mandolin, Wurlitzer, and piano, leading to a fuller, more rounded sound, which is only enhanced by the live nature of these recordings.
The gently strummed California opens proceedings. The first single from the album, it’s a song which documents an illicit visit Diane made to her former home in Nevada City, California, which had become vacant, but which still occupies her thoughts: “Little sister in the shallows, laughing down the hallways of my mind/I hear the screendoor slam behind her, California treat her kind”. Rather than just a simple musing on the past, though, the song’s greater meaning rests in its exploration of the elusiveness of memory, with Diane referencing a woman misremembered from her past – “All these faces, names escape me..” Its subject matter – where place holds memory and the past refuses to stay buried – mines similar ground to that explored on her previous album, Looking Glass, where Diane also mused on people from her yesteryears, now lost to time.
Galloping, the follow-up song, feels like something of a fever dream. Written while Diane was bedridden with illness, its driving, repetitive rhythm mimics the song’s title and the thoughts racing through her mind. In contrast, In My Own Time is a more gentle meditation on how the distractions of the modern world can easily prove a thief to precious time, and the need to live more properly inside the moment.
Dusty Roses, the second single from the album, is a perfect reflectoin on loss – not just in a literal sense, but in the way it describes the way in which people have the capacity to lose a sense of who they really are because of mental health struggles, drug addiction, trauma, depression, or grief – and how the gossamer thin thread by which all our lives hang together can easily become unwound. An extremely affecting number inspired by a friend of Diane’s whose life took a wrong turn some years ago, its tumbling, fingerpicked opening from Peter Lalish is counterpointed by Anna Tivel’s more strident violin, which evokes the sense of yearning and loss reflected in the song’s lyrical content: “where is our girl gone?”
The album reaches a genuine high point with Spring Is A Fine Time To Die, the song Diane wrote to honour Michael Hurley and the music he left behind. A florist friend of Diane’s told her that Spring was the kindest time to die as the flowers are blooming, the light is returning, and there is rebirth and renewal all around: “Magnolia, Tulip, and Daphne, too/ Flesh is temporary but your songs will carry on forever”. Like the rest of the album, the speed with which Diane wrote the song gives it a real sense of immediacy, which marries perfectly with the poignancy of its lyrical content.
The more personal nature of songs such as Wide Open Spaces, which celebrates the differences between herself and her brother, and the more unconditional love of a mother to her child in To Be Kind vie with the more overtly political nature of Diane’s fury at the hypocrisy and double standards of the nation’s leaders in Piss, Coffee, Blood Or Wine, written after seeing a man lying on the street: “They Line their pockets with our souls/Men holding guns, and hiding money/Always at the church on Sunday”.
The album 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.”
For all its preoccupation with what slips away — faces misremembered, friends taken too early, the houses we once lived in — Who’s Keeping Time? is markedly less solitary than anything Diane has made since To Be Still. Hurley’s death sent her back into the room with other musicians, and the attic recordings have the warmth of an ensemble that can feel where the next phrase is going before it gets there. The album doesn’t argue against loss; it gathers people around it. “Everything in perpetual motion,” Alela says. “We’re all just passing through.”
Who’s Keeping Time? (May 22nd, 2026) Loose Music (UK/EU) / Fluff & Gravy Records (US)
Bandcamp: https://aleladiane.bandcamp.com/album/whos-keeping-time
Live Session:
Alela Diane On Tour:
May 22 — Zurich, CH @ Rote Fabrik
May 23 — Schorndorf, DE @ Manufaktur
May 24 — Beverungen, DE @ Orange Blossom Festival
May 25 — Rotterdam, NL @ LantarenVenster
May 26 — Deventer, NL @ Burgerweeshuis
May 28 — London, UK @ Rough Trade Denmark Street
June 12 — Trout Lake, WA @ Trout Lake Hall*
June 13 — Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios*
June 17 — Spokane, WA @ The Chameleon*
June 18 — Seattle, WA @ Sunset Tavern*
Jun 19 — Bellingham, WA @ New Prospect Theatre*
June 27 — Vance, FR @ Eldorado Americana Festival
July 1 — Bremen, DE @ TBA
July 3 — Nürnberg, DE @ St. Katharina Open Air
July 5 — Paris, FR @ Days Off Festival
July 30 – August 2 — Happy Valley, OR @ Pickathon
August 5 — Santa Cruz, CA @ Crepe Place*
August 6 — San Francisco, CA @ The Chapel*
August 7 — Caspar, CA @ Caspar Wine*
August 8 — Grass Valley, CA @ Center For the Arts*
August 11 — Ojai, CA @ Ojai Deer Lodge*
August 12 — San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar*
August 13 — Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy & Harriet’s*
August 14 — Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room*
August 15 — Morro Bay, CA @ The Siren*
August 21 — Quilcene, WA @ Tarboo Festival
August 22 — Olympia, WA @ Crow House
September 9 — Philadelphia, PA @ Kung Fu Necktie
September 11 — Boston, MA @ Warehouse XI
September 12 — Portland, ME @ SPACE
September 15 — Brooklyn, NY @ The Sultan Room
September 16 — South Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground
September 17 — Quebec City, CA @ L’Anti Bar & Spectacles
September 18 — Montreal, CA @ Théâtre Outremont
September 19 — Kingston, NY @ Unicorn Bar
September 30 — Dublin, IE @ Whelans
October 1 — Glasgow, UK @ St Lukes
October 2 — Manchester, UK @ Stoller Hall
October 3 — Bristol, UK @ The Lantern
October 4 — London, UK @ EartH Theater
October 30 — Antwerp, BE @ De Roma
October 31 — Nijmegen, NL @ Doornroosje
November 1 — Amsterdam, NL @ Zonnhuis
November 2 — Hamburg, DE @ Mojo
November 3 — Berlin, DE @ Columbia Theater
November 7 — Lausanne, CH @ Docks
November 15 — Graz, AT @ Helmut-List-Halle
November 16 — Vienna, AT @ Chelsea
*with support from Shannon Lay