You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe.

Just a heads up before we start, this episode contains references to drug use and drug addiction, including in young teens.

Alinda Segarra is a singer and songwriter from the Bronx. They formed Hooray for the Riffraff in 2007.

And since then, they've released eight albums. Their most recent is The Past is Still Alive,

which came out in 2024. It was named one of the best albums of the year in the New York Times,

the Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, and The Atlantic, and Pitchfork called it one of the best albums of the decade so far.

For this episode, I spoke to Alinda about the first track on the album, Alibi.

You know, you know that time can take you for a a spin, can really do you win, can leave you with

baby, try to live again and play another hand, maybe we'll start to bed, I want you understand, baby, help me understand. My name's Alinda Sagan'a for the riffraff.

I get the sense from this song that there's a lot of history that went into it.

But I was wondering, for you, where does the story of this song begin?

I think this song started shortly after I released my album Life on Earth, the album before Past is Still Alive. I released that in February 2022. And putting out a record so shortly after the pandemic was honestly hell. It was, it just felt

really hard. I hadn't put out a record in a long time. Traveling and touring was so scary and

stressful. I was just feeling like, is the world ending? You know, like, is music ever going to be the same? Am I ever going to be able to pay my rent? Like, I was feeling so much fear, just feeling like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. And I don't know how to do anything else. Making music and writing songs is my purpose in life.

So it was a really scary time period. But it was creating this urgency to be like, okay, let's just

give it one more go. And let's write as many songs as we can and be as bare as possible.

And at least I can tell myself, okay, I really gave it my all.

So I was at home in New Orleans.

I don't live there anymore, but I still lived there at the time.

And I was going on walks every day around the bayou,

and this line, you don't have to die if you don't want to die, was just ringing through my

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