“She has the sort of voice that both affirms one’s world-weariness and soothes it,” wrote Jim Vorel in Paste Magazine. “It feels like the aural equivalent of someone laying a hand on your shoulder and saying, ‘I’m here for you, if you need to talk.’”
In times like these, Alela Diane’s haunting and reflective new songs seem to ask, where can we find shelter?
That question—of shelter, of refuge—links Looking Glass to Diane’s entire body of work, which often touches on the various meanings of home, past and present.
A self-described home-body whose tastes run toward the antique and the homemade, Diane is likely to be found drinking tea in a rocking chair on her wraparound porch (when not corralling her two young daughters). And she traces the genesis of her creative life to the traumatic loss of her first place of refuge: her magical childhood home, nestled among the mountains and rivers of Nevada City, California. When she was 19, her parents divorced and sold the house, where she recalls often listening to her parents harmonize bluegrass songs in the kitchen. Her first album, The Pirate’s Gospel, was inspired by that loss.
On a trip back to Nevada City, after learning that the beloved house had come up for sale Diane stopped by with her then six-year old daughter. Sixteen years had passed since she’d last walked through those wood-paneled rooms. The new owners weren’t home, but, as she writes in the new song “Dream a River,” she found the front door standing ajar. Something compelled her to walk inside, becoming “a trespasser in the place she once called home.” The previous owners hadn’t changed a thing, she said. It was like sneaking through a life-sized time capsule from a lost era in Diane’s life.
The song showcases another of Diane’s deep interests: how the past is always with us, a source of sadness, sometimes, but also solace, a kind of permanent foundation on which we all walk into the rest of our lives.
More than one song on Looking Glass draws meaning from reflecting on earlier versions of herself, as in these lines from “When We Believed” about her days as a young touring musician: “And I think of who I was then/Who I am now/Who am I now, that I was then?”
These questions felt newly potent for Diane during the recording of Looking Glass, which took place during a time of great personal transition. Diane, who has been a full-time musician for fifteen years and has toured extensively in Europe and North America, recorded Looking Glass during the same weeks that she and her family were selling the Portland house she bought at the age of 26. Diane’s family had now outgrown the house, but the leaving was bittersweet for her. While living there, she’d been married, divorced, and married again, and become the mother of two children.
The result is an album that represents a new artistic achievement for Diane. Looking Glass is the first of her records to be produced by the celebrated Tucker Martine (Neko Case, My Morning Jacket, The Decembrists). The album was arranged by her longtime friend and fellow musician Heather Woods Broderick. Notable guest musicians include Carl Broemel (My Morning Jacket), Scott Avett (The Avett Brothers), Eli Moore (Lake), Mikaela Davis, Luke Ydsitie (Blind Pilot), and Ryan Fracesconi (Joanna Newsom).
