As a teenager, Alela Diane earned straight A’s, did not
drink, and refused to pick up a guitar. Completely unremarkable
accomplishments on their own, but for Diane, these were deliberate and
brazen acts of pure adolescent mutiny.
“That was me rebelling,” explains Diane. “It’s pretty funny, it was
the opposite of what most kids are doing. But at school you feel weird
and self-conscious about having hippie parents.” She adds, “I would
strive to do really well, so that I would be more successful than my
parents, and so I could have a regular job.” But Diane’s role as a
square, and possible future Young Republican, was not meant to be: “At
a certain point, I just embraced it.”
This embrace allowed for the delicate-voiced Diane to include her
father, Tom Menig, as a key component on her latest and most
spectacular work to date, To Be Still. Early in the recording
process Diane packed up and fled Portland for the slower pace of her
hometown of Nevada City, California. There, she settled in her father’s
studio and assembled the gorgeous backbone for a record of shimmering
rural folk, rustic melodies, and a singing voice that reaches levels of
pure vocal beauty and sorrow seldom experienced since the days of the
late Karen Dalton.
And while dad’s previous work for a Grateful Dead tribute
band—the DeadBeats (“The best Grateful Dead cover band I’ve ever
heard!”—Mickey Hart)—might not be the ideal fit for the
pastoral hymns of Diane, it was the comfort that she was seeking. “He’s
super easy to work with and so laidback,” she explains. In the creation
of To Be Still, Diane was joined by a mixed bag of professional
musicians—folk singer Mariee Sioux and Nina Gerber, the former
guitarist for ’70s-’80s folk icon Kate Wolf—plus her
aforementioned father on guitar (“My dad totally shreds”), her
boyfriend on bass, and even a former childhood violin instructor on
strings.
Her recording technique is refreshingly simple, eschewing the use of
hired guns that might be expected to appear on a debut recording for a
large label (last year Diane migrated from Holocene Music to Rough
Trade for To Be Still): “It just felt more comfortable than
trying to take it to the big time, and hiring ‘proper’ musicians.”
The unorthodox assembly of friends first, musicians second gives
To Be Still a natural comfort, an organic and hospitable
collection of warm songs that are inviting and deeply personal. As
always, the centerpiece is Diane’s gentle vocal delivery: a radiant,
yet vulnerable croon with a timeless grace that permeates the
recording. This is best experienced in the album’s title track, as she
confidently sings, “I won’t drag my feet in whatever dirt you track
in.” And later, on the wistful “The Alder Trees,” Diane longingly
describes, “…the ladies who weren’t allowed to sing/Sewing all their
pretty rows of thread instead of seed.” As in both of these songs, and
throughout the album as a whole, nature plays a major role. When Diane
lovingly describes her idyllic surroundings, or “a maze of children’s
feet in orchard trees,” you can credit her hippie upbringing, and a
natural demeanor that respectfully harkens to the back-to-the-land
movement forever anchored to the core of so much influential ’60s folk
music. A true product of her environment, Diane’s delicate music
expands on a dusty folk past, building toward an unseen future. And to
assemble your art with such simultaneous comfort and risk is something
any father would be proud of.